Christopher Nolan’s highly anticipated biopic, Oppenheimer, has clearly offended Indian nationalists. Although Indian media previously felt proud of its religious scriptures credited in Nolan’s cinematic masterpiece, the dialogues and the actual scene upset Hindu community.
Although Nolan isn’t known for including intimate scenes in his films, but Oppenheimer features multiple such sequences played between Oppenheimer and Jean Tatlock.
Spoiler Alert!
The controversial scene includes Pugh grabbing a copy of Hindu scripture and telling Oppenheimer to read from it.
Oppenheimer (player by Cilian Murphy) then utters a verse from the Bhagwad Gita moments before he engaged in a sexual intercourse with his mistress, Jean Tatlock (played by Florence Pugh).
In the sequence, Oppenheimer says the quote he famously uttered during a TV documentary in 1965, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
As soon as the film premiered in India, social media users threatened to boycott the movie because of that one scene which a nationalist described as a “scathing attack on Hinduism”.
“This should be investigated… on an urgent basis and those involved should be severely punished,” the nationalist “Save Culture Save India Foundation” said in a press release.
Remarks about Oppenheimer by the organisation’s founder, government official Uday Mahurkar, condemning the movie were also retweeted more than 3,600 times.
Despite the lingering threat, Universal Pictures India, the local unit of the film’s producers, did not immediately respond to a request for comment nor did officials from the film certification board respond to a request for comment.
Christopher Nolan’s directorial boasts an ensemble cast with Irish actor Cillian Murphy as US physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who oversaw the creation of the atomic bomb during World War Two.
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