Les aventures d'un mathématicien

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.