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.

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.

The juxtaposition of the movie's whimsical title with its somber subject matter is jarring. The story revolves around the invention of the atomic and hydrogen bombs and the detonation of both, killing hundreds of thousands of people to end World War II.

Though the lead character was well chosen to embody the emotional conflict of his participation in such a horrendous project, his acting skills would have been better served with a more developed character arc. While the film includes some interesting dialogue during the inventing process, it is stretched rather thin by the persistent scenes about regret. Consequently, the film unfolds as one hundred and forty-two minutes characterized by relentless angst.

The film would have benefited by a more comprehensive story line.

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.

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.