Abenteuer eines Mathematikers

I am a math teacher who frequently looks for quality movies depicting science/mathematics to entice my students to the beauty of these disciplines. Examples of this are Contact, A beautiful mind, The imitation game, etc. This movie though, I would never recommend it to anyone. It's very slow, bland, poorly directed, poorly acted and just... plain boring. It's not a bad movie, but it's asymptotically close to be one.

It's difficult to make such a historical project and such a once-in-a-lifetime gathering of geniuses (Neumann, Ulam, Teller, Oppenheimer, ...) look dull but this movie achieves precisely that.

The only actor that was close to deliver a good performance was the one depicting Edward Teller. He was able to incarnate the acrid, warring personality of that scientist.

If you want to know what was going on in Los Alamos during the Manhattan project this is the film you should watch, not "Oppenheimer". This film is based on the autobiography of Stan Ulam who was actually there during and after the war ended. Ulam worked in the relatively unknown fusion bomb group headed by Edward Teller. This was a failure during the war so is not mentioned in most histories. This film accurately gives credit to Johnny (as he was known) von Neumann who was the person who was able to make the connection between theory and actual design of the successful bombs. Oppenheimer's main contribution was recognizing von Neuman's ability.

There are several errors even here. One while the stated rationale for making the bomb was to prevent Hitler from making it first. But the German physicists were way ahead of the Americans so knew that an atomic bomb was a very expensive longshot, especially for Germany who was fighting on many fronts. So they never tried. Thus this rationale was mostly hype on our part. But the scientists said nothing because this was a wonderful adventure in physics.

Another was that Tellers main rationale for his fusion bomb was that it was thought to be no radioactive and there would be fewer civilian collateral causalities. As it turned out the eventual hydrogen bomb built after the war was a hybrid, made mostly of uranium and plutonium, which gave the original bombs their lethal radioactivity, with only a small fusion reaction, again mostly for hype.

One error in the visuals is that von Neuman was shown before the Trinity test standing in front of his computer which had presumably made the calculations. Actually von Neuman had only recently come up with the design for the computer and was upset at being recalled to Los Alamos for the Trinity test because he wanted to start building his computer in Princeton. In fact he had at that time only one 20 year old physicist's wife with little formal math or physics background to help him with the calculations. Reportedly he told her that" he was inventing the computer to replace her because she was so bad at arithmetic." Actually it took 15 years before electronic computers were allowed to replace the "lady" computers, see the great film "Hidden Figures" for a good exposition of that.

Sadly this film was had a lower advertising budget so few have seen it, unlike "Oppenheimer". Accuracy is boring so it hard to recommend this film to non science geeks. But as biopics go, this one wasn't bad.

I thought the story was pretty interesting. But overall it was pretty slow moving. And the actors were all quite wooden and stiff. Almost no one showed any emotion in the whole movie.

Poor directing, long pauses and unnecessary scenes make it painstakingly slow and boring. There are no adventures or any sort of interesting dialogues or scenes.

I went into this on the hope (unlikely, but one dreams...) of a movie that actually tried to show something of the life of a mathematician, and the excitement of working with physicists at a time when so much physics was coming together.

But of course we get absolutely ZERO of that. Instead we get precisely the cliches you'd expect -- nuclear weapons are bad, mkay; family life is hard, mkay.

I don't know what goes through the mind of someone making a movie like this. Everything that is present is present done far better in a thousand other movies. Everything that would make Ulam's life especially interesting, the specific details of intellectual life, are nowhere present. You could have made the same movie about practically anyone in WW2 - family disruption, "bombing Japan, justified or not?", "people die in war". WTF cares. Ulam is ONLY interesting as a mathematician -- and yet we see nothing of that except some uninteresting references to gambling and casinos, as though gabling is the only interesting aspect of measure theory.

Truly a pointless waste of time.