O Matemático

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.

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.

Have you ever wondered why US dropped bombs on Japan 3 months after Germany surrendered and US had practically won the war!! Not only that, it dropped two bombs!!!

A moral ethical question that had troubled many brilliant minds in developing the hydrogen bomb as well as the A-bomb. One of them was Stan Ulam. A brilliant mathematician who knew the solution to the immense heat issue in the development of a Hydrogen Bomb. But he fought his own battles of morality vs his job before he could reveal the solution. He later developed the famous Monte-Carlo method from the idea that one does not need to play a game to know its conclusion. Movie lacks thrill and has somewhat poor, but average performances but good production saves a little less known interesting story and makes it a one-time watch.

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.