Universal Pictures
As a typically reluctant consumer of Christopher Nolan films—save for the occasion when they star a hot man and are apparently required viewing before or following Barbie—I had very few expectations walking into my sold-out screening of Oppenheimer this weekend.
I knew, at some point, that I would feel a very large boom or two, given the biopic’s premise about the invention of the atomic bomb, led by Oppenhiemer, and its catastrophic landings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II. Aside from that, I had mostly been warned via tweets and some disparaging articles about another on-screen explosion of sorts (sorry!): the film’s two brief sex scenes, plus a nude post-coital scene, featuring J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) and his lover-turned-mistress Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh).
Already, one of the scenes has caused controversy overseas. The first, in which Tatlock instructs Oppenheimer to translate a passage from the Bhagavad Gita while they’re doing the act, has been criticized by Hindu nationalists for disrespecting the religious text. India’s information commissioner Uday Mahurkar even composed a lengthy tweet to Nolan, calling for the scene to be removed.