Question: Were the scientists involved really concerned about igniting the atmosphere?
A nameless member
5th Aug 2023
Oppenheimer (2023)
31st Jul 2023
Oppenheimer (2023)
Factual error: When Oppenheimer delivers his lecture in "Dutch" he's actually speaking German. Although in the German dubbed version, the language heard is Dutch.
31st Jul 2023
Oppenheimer (2023)
Continuity mistake: The strong wind blowing when Oppenheimer is approaching/climbing the tower completely stops when he's at the top.
30th Jul 2023
Oppenheimer (2023)
Trivia: Josh Hartnett was one of the final 3 actors in the running to play Batman in Batman Begins, but withdrew. He later said he regretted his decision and wanted to work with Christopher Nolan, finally getting his chance here.
30th Jul 2023
Oppenheimer (2023)
Trivia: Cillian Murphy's sixth film with Christopher Nolan, after Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, Inception, The Dark Knight Rises, and Dunkirk.
30th Jul 2023
Oppenheimer (2023)
Trivia: The IMAX prints of the film are 11 miles long, weighing 600lb.
30th Jul 2023
Oppenheimer (2023)
Trivia: Christopher Nolan has stated there are no shots in the movie that were entirely created using visual effects. Visual effects studio DNEG worked exclusively on the movie, and it marked the eighth collaboration between Christopher Nolan and DNEG.
30th Jul 2023
Oppenheimer (2023)
Trivia: Robert Downey Jr. declared this was "the best film I've ever been in" at the UK premiere.
30th Jul 2023
Oppenheimer (2023)
Trivia: During a break from acting, promised to his wife, Matt Damon had one condition: he'd return if Christopher Nolan called. Lucky for him, Nolan offered the role of Leslie Groves, pausing Damon's hiatus.
30th Jul 2023
Oppenheimer (2023)
Trivia: Alden Ehrenreich is one of the few main cast not playing a real person - his character has no name.
30th Jul 2023
Oppenheimer (2023)
Trivia: This film was produced remarkably quickly for one of this scale, with only 3 months for preparation and 57 days of filming.
22nd Jul 2023
Oppenheimer (2023)
Factual error: After the successful Trinity test in 1945, people in a crowd are holding small US flags with 50 stars on them (offset rows). At the time there were only 48 states and the flag had 48 stars in even rows. The 50 star flag didn't exist until 1960, after Alaska and Hawaii were made states in 1959.
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Suggested correction: While this is correct, an argument can be made that since the colour scenes are meant to be subjective and the black and white scenes are meant to be objective, Oppenheimer could have been unintentionally mapping the modern US flag onto this scene.
That's a ridiculous stretch with zero evidence, not least as 48 star flags are seen in colour in other scenes. Sometimes a mistake is simply a mistake.
There is evidence, though. Nolan said so himself. Look it up. As for the mistake itself, I'm merely repeating what I've read on Twitter, and this correction was merely a suggestion. Seeing the 48 star flags in other colour scenes still doesn't disprove this theory. It is just a theory though, so no need to shoot it down so hard.
He's said subjective in terms of the colour scenes being "first person", and maybe not strictly factual in terms of creating moments between characters and conveying emotion, but nowhere does that stretch to "one random scene happens to feature 50 star flags because Oppenheimer is mapping the modern flag onto it, when nothing like that happens anywhere else in the film."
Meh, take it up with Twitter. I just thought it was interesting, so I posted it here for a different point of view/perspective for others to read. It is most likely bull**** though.
The fact that a director realized they had made a mistake and retroactively made up a deus ex machina explanation for it in no way invalidates the mistake. Nice try, Mr. Nolan but this posting is absolutely valid.
While Christopher Nolan's talked about the subjective/objective colour/black and white thing, which is entirely fair and no doubt exactly his intention, I don't think he's actually tried to "excuse" this by using that explanation, that's just other people trying to connect the two things. I'm not sure Nolan has commented on the flag issue in interviews at all.
Precisely, and I was in no way trying to invalidate the original mistake. I just found the whole theory interesting and posted it here. It is rather hilarious that a director with such attention to detail like Nolan would have missed something like this. We shall see if he gets it fixed for the streaming/physical release.
It's not fixed in the home video version. However, the behind-the-scenes materials provide a reason for the mistake, in that putting a crowd in the scene was apparently a spur-of-the-moment decision. It's like that in their haste to bring in the crowd, the set decorators bought some modern miniature flags and put them into the scene without anyone realizing the 48/50 discrepancy.
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Answer: The short version is "no, not really". Much like in the film, the possibility was considered, a lot of calculations were done, and it was agreed by everyone privy to them that the chance was basically zero. Also like in the film: "what do you want from theory alone?" - it couldn't be guaranteed to be absolutely zero, but then the chance of almost anything happening is never absolutely zero. A 1946 report by three of the scientists stated: "whatever the temperature to which a section of the atmosphere may be heated, no self-propagating chain of nuclear reactions is likely to be started. The energy losses to radiation always overcompensate the gains due to the reactions."