A drama costs 100m budget?
How is it possible?
shareThey actually built replicas of Manhattan project sites! The "nuke" was many tons of explosive, probably ANFO.
shareAnd it looked nothing like an actual nuke - a detriment of Nolan's overcommitment to practical effects, just like the small-scale Dunkirk. I'm completely for practical effects if at all possible, but not if they're breaking immersion instead of aiding it.
shareI would prefer them not to use CGI unless it was an actual physics equation based simulation of the explosion as they did with the black hole simulation in Interstellar.
shareI would generally agree, but the black hole in Interstellar was something we hadn't seen, therefore there was a kind of logic to doing a mathematical simulation to see how it came out. With the Trinity test, we already have fairly high quality footage of it, and accurately replicating its look would be of primary importance - a crazy physics sim may not be necessary.
I see no reason why they couldn't have implemented some of the actual footage. Do a new super high quality scan of the original 35mm negatives, clean it up/upscale with modern AI techniques, re-add proper 70mm grain, and maybe enhance it with a 3D recreation to add some additional detail.
He could have probably even kept the brief distant shots of the actors watching the practical gasoline explosion, and the close-ups of the fire. All that was passable - it's just when they showed the full explosion on its own that it didn't hold up.