Oppenheimer Viewer Spots Historical Error

It's a fleeting moment in a three-hour-long movie. But it's a scene that will have Oppenheimer's historical consultants cringing along with the armchair historians who pointed it out. As CNN reports, viewers of the film depicting J. Robert Oppenheimer's life have spotted an error in a scene set in 1945, showing Cillian Murphy's Oppenheimer receiving a standing ovation from a crowd of people waving American flags. The flags depict 50 stars, though there were only 48 states at the time, with Alaska and Hawaii to be added in 1959. More on that and other controversies:

• The callout: Twitter user Andy Craig may have been first to highlight the discrepancy Friday. Of the film, he wrote, "It was good and all, but I'll be that guy and complain they used 50-star flags in a scene set in 1945."
• A simple mistake? Some questioned if it was an overlooked error. The 48-star flag does appear in other scenes from the same period, as some Twitter users pointed out.

• Or deliberate?: One Twitter user argued the use of the 50-star flag made sense as the film flits between black-and-white and color scenes of the same events to indicate different perspectives. "As the colored scenes were from Oppenheimer's perspective," this scene would come "from his present day memory," when the flag included 50 stars, wrote @CtrldEntropy.
• A sloppy surprise: Viewers were surprised by the reveal. After all, director Christopher Nolan "is known for being a perfectionist," per Insider. "Shocked Nolan made that mistake," wrote one Twitter user, per the New York Post. "It seems sloppy," wrote another. "They put substantial effort into everything else."

• Sticking to the facts: Overall, the film tracks closely with Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin's Oppenheimer biography, American Prometheus. "Few films have ever been more based on a book than Oppenheimer," which "manages the astonishing feat of distilling almost every single one of the book's 591 pages onto celluloid," per Vulture's Nate Jones.
• Where it diverges: It was Communist Party member Jean Tatlock who finally ended her romance with Oppenheimer, not the other way around, as Nolan portrays it, writes Jones. "What this says about Nolan's filmmaking vis-à-vis female agency, I'll leave you to debate."
• The bomb drop: Journalist and author Evan Thomas also disputes the film's suggestion that the US might've avoided dropping the atomic bomb on Japan, per Time. After $2 billion spent, "there was a huge amount of momentum to drop that bomb no matter what," with the intention that it would end World War II, he says.
• Another controversy: Some in India are calling for a boycott of the film over a scene featuring Oppenheimer reciting a verse from the Bhagwad Gita, a holy Hindu scripture, just before engaging in sex, per Reuters. The nationalist Save Culture Save India Foundation has even called for those involved to "be severely punished."

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