Les aventures d'un mathématicien

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.

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.

As of today, August 2022, this movie has an IMDb rating of 5.5 but it is a better movie than that. Some reviews mention that it is "slow" but research and experimentation is usually like that. I can see that a person who is NOT deeply into Science and Mathematics, or the Manhattan Project in the 1940s, may have a harder time appreciating the interest and importance of this man's story.

Ulam was a Polish immigrant, a Mathematician, who crossed the Atlantic in 1939. He became a professor but after a few years was recruited to move to Los Alamos and be a part of the Manhattan Project, to develop Atomic and Hydrogen bomb technology. He had a major role but came away conflicted, the science was important but there was the guilt of creating something that could and did kill so many in the two Japanese bombings.

He eventually went back to his teaching job. He died in 1984 at the age of 75.

Good, interesting movie, I watched it at home on Amazon streaming movies.

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.