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.

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 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.

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.

Adventures of a Mathematician or The Mathematician (2020) is a German, Polish and English co-production focusing on the participation of mathematician Stanislaw M. Ulam in the construction of the atomic bomb, part of the Manhattan Project led by Oppenheimer starting in 1942, that took place in Nevada , USA. The film was based on Ulam's autobiography (published in 1983 as the book Adventures of a Mathematician). It is an average film, mainly due to the high volume of condensed information presented in a film that lasts 1h 42min. I believe that the subject would have a better and more interesting treatment/development if it were organized as a mini series. Parts of the film were loose and/or unnecessary since they were not developed (such as, for example, the participation of the mathematician's brother in the story). I didn't know this mathematician, nor did I know about his participation in the project, and also, that he had a significant contribution to the development of the hydrogen bomb. The world would be better off if any of these bombs (or any other) had never been created.