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.
Factual error: After Napoleon's coup of the consul, there is a scene featuring Josephine carrying a toy Pomeranian dog. While Pomeranians existed at this time, they were much bigger in size (upwards of 50 pounds). The more modern type of Pomeranian that she is carrying wouldn't start coming about for another century.
Continuity mistake: When Lenny is directing the choir, and really getting into it, the cigarette he has jumps from his mouth to his hand instantly.
Factual error: In the famous "Rumble In The Jungle" fight between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali, the movie portrays Foreman as fighting out of the red corner and Ali fighting out of the blue corner. In the actual fight, Ali fought out of the red corner and Foreman was in the blue.
Factual error: In the film, Blackberry is shown being "raided" by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). As a Canadian company with its headquarters in Canada, the SEC, by itself, has no jurisdiction to effectuate such a raid on the premises. In real life, the Ontario Securities Commission (OSC) brought the case against Blackberry co-CEO, Jim Balsillie.
Continuity mistake: When Miguel is with the pedophile, he is given bread (or something similar) to eat. Shot changes, and the bread is suddenly bitten. The bread's length keeps changing several times between shots.
Factual error: Henk arrives in Moscow. The KGB gets a copy of his passport. In the next scene, a building can be seen, and a Trabant 601 drives through the shot (one light out). Trabant was East German made and widely exported on the Eastern Block but never to the Soviet Union. This car is definitely wrong there. (00:30:40)
Factual error: Early in the film, as the train pulls into the station, you can see 2 European Traffic Control Systems. A signalling system that was only installed in 2010.
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.
THGhost
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.
THGhost
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.
THGhost
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.
THGhost
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.
Vader47000