Les aventures d'un mathématicien

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.

Back when I was a chemistry and math student in university, this was the type of movie I dreamed of one day making. A movie which has to balance the science, history and the biography part of a biopic - which often feels like a no-win balance. Enough science to make it interesting for its target audience but not too much to alienate everyone else. Enough of a human story expected from a biopic but not too much to make it boring. Personally, I thought the balance was right. There's some real math and science in the story, the history is absolutely fascinating, the American family elements don't add much to the story, but a necessary element of a traditional biopic.

The other user reviews are complaining about the "adventures" part of the title, as if they're expecting an action movie or something. But the title just comes from a part of the dialogue when they make the big decision to move to Los Alamos, "Are you ready for an adventure?" Immigrants moving across the country, leaving their "cushy" academia job for the Manhattan Project. That is an adventure to them.

There are a lot of big names and interesting aspects to the Manhattan project, and a lot of interesting and different stories that could have been told, but this one is personal to the filmmakers. The Polish identity is a running theme here. It's an ode to Stanislaw Ulam and should not be viewed as a history of the Manhattan Project (which it is not, it's just one small aspect of it that Ulam was involved in) and is very much a traditional independent biopic.

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.

This is the story of the mathematical geniuses behind the Manhattan Project. It's an overall aesthetically pleasing film with decent cinematography and good in most technical aspects. Unfortunately it falls short in terms of script, where the protagonist's drama misses all targets and becomes very superficial. His story does not convince the viewer of the significance of whatever drives the drama forward: personal, ethical, spiritual, political, or other motivations. It ends up feeling like the director is trying too much to shove some feelings into the viewer, but without any foundations to substantiate them. None of the relationships (wife, friend, colleagues, the institution, etc.) goes at an adequate depth to produce meaningful dynamics - so the torment seems without much reason. It's a pity, cause I would expect that such a context is a great opportunity for the exact opposite.