Le projet Manhattan

Scientist John Mathewson (John Lithgow) has improve the purity of plutonium. The military sends him to Ithaca to perfect the process. He likes his real estate agent Elizabeth Stephens (Jill Eikenberry) and tries to befriend her son Paul (Christopher Collet) by showing him around the lab. Paul is a smart inventive teenager who decides to steal some plutonium and make a nuclear bomb for his science fair project. Jenny Anderman (Cynthia Nixon) is the girl and the friend.

This has a bit of WarGames but the lead kid doesn't have the charm of Matthew Broderick. Of course who has the charm of Ferris Bueller. The lead is a teen brat stereotype without the funny sensibility. It spends too much time with montages and slow action. It also makes the mistake of concentrating a bit too much time on the adults. John Lithgow is such a great star that this mistake is understandable. As in many of these 80s caper movies, there is a lot of unreal unbelievability but one must accept such things. The movie struggles mostly with the pompous teen. He is a spoiled teen without any of the comedy. However it is fun to imagine a teen building a nuclear bomb, and defusing the bomb in the end is kinda exciting.

Not quite understanding the bad reviews here. Going in it's easy to see immediately that this movie was going to be flippant and a bit of a fairy tale. How can anyone take it seriously? Instead, just sit back and enjoy the ride.

This movie is basically a series of unlikely events strung together. Can they happen, sure but probably in another dimension. But still, I found this film a guilty pleasure. It's best to just put your mind on hold for a bit and just have fun.

On a side note, I really miss the 80's version of John Lithgow. He is such a great actor and back then he was at his prime.

"The Manhattan Project" is a fairly entertaining movie, so long as you keep it out from under a microscope. Still, those holes are inescapable. Like how did Paul get the resources to fashion a nuclear lab? More than that, how would a high-schooler know how to handle radioactive materials? Can' really sweep that under the "he's a bright kid" rug; we're talking about resources (or maybe it's completely plausible; hell, I'm not a whiz kid). And didn't any Medatomics personnel notice that four-week-old hole in the wall? Putting that all aside, I kinda like this movie. Mostly because I'm a Lithgow fan, and the big bomb defusal scene packs some suspense. But also for superficial reasons, like Cynthia Nixon's house. And the locations, there's some pretty scenery here.

6/10

There are some things man was never meant to know. Or at least high school kids. The story is interesting in its concept: smart kid builds nuclear device and is barely saved from blowing everyone to smithereens. (Vide: "War Games".) Its execution however makes one squirm with discomfort rather than suspense. First, the acting isn't bad. John Lithgow is especially effective in his scenes with Jill Eikenberry -- a genuinely nice guy just trying to get along. The rest of the performances are adequate. But the character played by Christopher Collett is truly abrasive.

His scientific intellect is honed to a razor edge, as we find out near the beginning when he arranges a small explosion in the lab drawer of a fellow student who is his rival in science class. Hilarious. His smugness is almost unbearable. And science is about all he's good at. He realizes that Lithgow is "hitting on my mom" (innocently enough) and resents him for it. He doesn't seem to know what an Oedipus complex is. He hasn't heard of Woodward and Bernstein. He asks, "Who's Anne Frank?", and isn't being rhetorical.

Worst of all, he doesn't really care about his non-scientific ignorance. He's only a few steps removed from the maniac in "Pi." The plot is simply unbelievable. He may be extremely clever but unless he has some sort of PSI power as well, he could not disarm the alarm system in two shakes of a lamb's tail -- let alone unfailingly operate the complex robotic systems in the laboratory. And without so much as a previous glance at it, he knows that the inner wall of the lab can be cut with a pen knife, and he knows just where to cut it too. He may be superhuman as well.

Radioactive plutonium is still radioactive, even without having reached critical mass, isn't it? And although rubber gloves may stop larger particles like protons, they don't provide much protection against gamma rays, do they? I may be wrong, but at least I'm willing to admit my ignorance, which is more than this egocentric showoff is able to do.

The first time I saw this movie it was fascinating, especially the first half, not the last part, which deteriorates into a familiar pattern. But I saw it again recently and found it more irritating than anything else, because of Collett's character and because the plot was so full of holes. At least I HOPE it was full of holes. If it were so easy to throw together a nuclear weapon occupying a space the size of a trombone case, and to do so in only a few weeks, I'd hate to think of what might happen if some religious fundamentalist antimodernization Ludditic cryptolunatic saw the movie and it gave him ideas.

The ending is a heart-warming development in which Lithgow, decides the fight the military and declares, "No more secrets", and throw open the gates to the college kids cheering outside. Right.

My review was written in May 1986 after a screening at the Cannes Film Festival Market.

Marshall Brickman's "The Manhattan Project" is a warm, comedy-laced doomsday story which packs plenty of entertainment for summer audiences, but falls short of its potential as a thriller.

Topical premise has 16-year-old student Paul Stevens (Christopher Collet) tumbling to the fact that the new scientist in town, Dr. Mathewson (John Lithgow) is working with plutonium in what fronts as a pharmaceutical research installation. While Mathewson is romancing Stevens' mom (Jill Eikenberry) -the husband having split years ago -the genius kid is plotting with his helpful girlfriend Jenny (Cynthia Nixon) to steal a canister of plutonium and build an atomic bomb. Their goal: to expose the danger of the secret nuclear plant placed in their community in the strongest possible terms.

Using clever one-liners and many humorous situations (particularly when Lithgow is clumsily coming on to Eikenberry early in the film), Brickman manages successfully to sugarcoat the story's serious message concerning the ongoing folly of arms buildup and reliance upon nuclear deterrence for security. What keeps the film from being a thriller is his matter-of-fact direction, extremely sluggish in many scenes early on. Only a very interesting "Rififi ''-style silent (background sound only) reel in which the hero steals the plutonium from the well-secured lab is strong enough to keep interest from wandering. Fortunately, later situations regain the story's momentum and lead to a rousing climax.

Collet is very appealing as the brilliant hero, almost convincing in situations that require him to be more resourceful than is truly possible. Lithgow adds quirky personality and charm to what might have become a standard "bad guy sees the light" assignment. As their respective sounding boards, Nixon and Eikenberry both contribute to the film's emphasis upon human values over mere hardware in a genre which has increasingly been upstaged by its special effects work.

Those special effects here are entirely realistic rather than showy, another feather in the cap of wiz Bran Ferren, who also appears in an opening reel cameo as a lab assistant. Philip Rosenberg's production design and Billy Williams' camerawork are exemplary.

Feature was financed by Thorn EMI Screen Entertainment, but print caught already had the Cannon logo at introduction, reflecting Cannon's recent buyout of what was once TESE.