Perfection is unattainable. It’s something to strive for, and getting anywhere close is an achievement. Christopher Nolan is keenly aware of this, and has spent the bulk of his directorial career telling stories about men who shoot for the stars and land on the moon. His latest film, Oppenheimer, has been hailed as one of his best, thanks to its skillful blend of period detail and riveting psychological drama.
It might be as close to cinematic perfection as Nolan has gotten, and yet, fans have noticed an error. Andy Craig posted a screenshot from a crucial moment in Oppenheimer in which the titular character (Cillian Murphy), is surrounded by American flags. It’s a beautifully staged and shot scene. The only problem is the flags are not from the time period.
Craig pointed out that the flags have 50 stars on them, which is accurate in 2023 but not so much in 1945, when the scene is supposed to be taking place. The error is made even more noticeable by the fact that another scene features an American flag with the correct number of stars, 48, for the time period. Hawaii and Alaska were not considered states when Oppenheimer was overseeing the creation of the atomic bomb.
There are some fans, according to Comic Book, who theorize that the use of the modern flag was meant to suggest that the scene is merely an Oppenheimer memory, in which case he’s misremembering small details about what was actually being waved that day. It’s a bit of a stretch if you ask us, and the error is barely noticeable due to the emotional weight of the scene and the wonderful performance by Murphy.
The passage of time has always been an important concept for Nolan. Nearly all of his films have included flashbacks or nonlinear storytelling (The Dark Knight is the lone exception), and he felt that Oppenheimer gave him the opportunity to tell a sort of origin story for the world we live in today (the one that has two more stars than it used to).
“[It’s an] origin story in a strange way, not a million miles away from the things we were doing with Batman and the Dark Knight trilogy,” the director told The Hollywood Reporter. “I got excited by [Oppenheimer’s] intellectual curiosity and adventurism in the 1920s, which was shared by all his peers. It was a revolution in physics that corresponded very closely to all the other revolutions in all aspects of life — the music of Stravinsky and modernism and literature, Picasso painting.”
Despite its adherence to the past, Oppenheimer is frighteningly relevant in 2023. Nuclear weapons are still being used as threats between different countries, and for Nolan, the opportunity to speak to a current issue was just as appealing as telling a decades-spanning story. “Oppenheimer’s story is the most dramatic example I know of the fraught relationship between science and government,” he noted. “The relationship between technology and government right now is one of the most difficult and frightening areas.”