Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

Absolutely Brilliant!

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

If you know the history of this project then you'll probably find it a little disappointing because parts of it are fictionalised and heavily dramatised. For example. protagonist Michael Merriman is a fictional character, and the accident he suffers never happened during the project, although that accident did occur in 1946 to a guy called Louis Slotin. Also, killing off this character at that point in the movie left me feeling somewhat cheated.While I enjoyed Paul Newman's role, I think he was miscast as General Groves, and Dwight Schultz was far too good looking for Oppenheimer, who in real life was thin and wirey and of somewhat unearthly looks. However, these criticisms don't spoil what is a good movie. My only real disappointment was the poorly simulated detonation at the end. In reality, the detonation began with an immediate silent, blinding blue-white flash, with the sound and blast wave arriving at the bunkers several seconds later. However, in the film, the flash is yellow and the sound is heard straight away.If you want an insight into what the project and those involved in it were really like, then I suggest you watch the documentary like "The Day After Trinity" and listen to Richard Feynman's amazing talk "Los Alamos from Below".

Fat Man & Little Boy plays like the Cliff's Notes version of an important period in history and science. The first moment we see a carefree, laughing Oppenheimer, it is obvious that the film is going to take quite a few liberties with characterization. When Paul Newman strides onto the scene, accompanied by "Patton"-like music, all credibility is immediately destroyed. My major problem with Fat Man & Little Boy is the character of Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer was a complex character, a misfit, a neurasthenic polymath. This film only scratches the surface of his personality, and the actor who plays him is horribly miscast, although he tries his best. Towards the final days of the Project, Oppenheimer had become extremely thin and cadaverous. The constant hounding by Communist hunters digging into his personal life coupled with his moral qualms about the use of the Bomb threw him into a state of nervous exhaustion bordering on paranoia. There is no hint of the inner man in this portrayal. The community of physicists at Los Alamos was a collection of brilliant and unusual men. There were many conflicts and a lot of competition going on which are pretty much ignored. It was frustrating to see all of this potentially rich material cast aside in order to simplify the film and make it accessible. In addition to ignoring the real characters involved in the Manhattan Project and misinterpreting the ones it treats, the film introduces John Cusak as the "Everyman Physicist," a fictional character created to humanize(?)the subject and engage the "average viewer," along with the obligatory love interest. This slows the movie down to a crawl and it was walking pretty slowly to begin with. This movie takes a situation rich in drama and conflict coupled with scientific and historical interest and turns it into a boring, simplistic soap opera.

rather, a badly savaged original screenplay. i've just been reading the chapter on this film and its inception in Alistair Owen's brilliant book of interviews with Bruce Robinson ('Smoking in Bed'). the point made here is that the then wonder-boy Roland joffé royally bum raped the screenplay through his own ego. Bruce Robinson defends his case well in the book and the documentary evidence which he accumulated during his research sounds pretty incontrovertible. (i can't help feeling in this respect that lot 49's comments are made from the position of ignorance he's so very keen to vilify.) it's just one of the ongoing catalogue of misfortunes for Bruce Robinson and the viewing public that he didn't get to make this particular film and we'll never get to see it. file alongside his film on jack the ripper being passed over - a proper film as opposed to the glossy, banal travesty that was...i can't even remember what the feck it was called. i just remember it being utter shite.

Six stars for Paul Newman's portrayal of General Groves, negative four for the inclusion of a highly fictionalized event where the truth is well documented. Michael Merriman did not really exist. His character--or at least his fate--is based loosely on that of Louis Slotin, a Canadian physicist who did not come to Los Alamos until after the war. He conducted his lethal "tail of the dragon" experiment in May 1946. This is a critical point. The effects of hard radiation on the human body were not known until they were observed in the victims of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasts. Had anyone died of radiation poisoning at Los Alamos before the Trinity test, it's very possible that the scientists would have abruptly stopped their work, and history would have been changed. Whether for the better or the worse we can only speculate. Someone should ask the producers and the director whether they added Merriman's character for dramatic effect or to deliver an anti-nuclear message. For a more even-handed and accurate treatment of events at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project, see the TV movie, "Day One," or better yet, read the Peter Wyden book on which it is based.