Lumsdal Good , But It Is Overrated By Some

Glucedee It's hard to see any effort in the film. There's no comedy to speak of, no real drama and, worst of all.

Plustown A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

Stephan Hammond It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

rameyzamora A waste of time and life, this movie proves what it looks like when Paul Newman isn't directed properly. Like Elizabeth Taylor and a few other very high level actors, Newman needed a particularly good hand to come up with his best work. This isn't it, and it's actually painfully embarrassing. Skip this one.

SnoopyStyle It's 1942 and 9 months after Pearl Harbor. Gen. Leslie Groves (Paul Newman) expected to move out from behind the desk to go to the frontlines. Instead, he is transferred to his perceived dead-end boondoggle. Oppenheimer (Dwight Schultz) advises him to gather the scientists in an isolate place for creative stress. Together they would lead the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Michael Merriman (John Cusack) is the young wide-eyed scientist. Kathleen Robinson (Laura Dern) is the nurse who falls for him. He befriends Capt. Schoenfield (John C. McGinley) who is the doctor investigating radiation. Seth Neddermeyer comes up with the idea for implosion. Oppenheimer is cheating on his wife Kitty (Bonnie Bedelia) with communist sympathizer Jean Tatlock (Natasha Richardson).The movie achieves something a little more difficult. It made a bunch of scientists interesting and it made the science understandable. I do hope that the story is more fact than fiction. However I won't rest my review on its accuracies. Paul Newman delivers a forceful performance. I wish Dwight Schultz is a bigger actor to counter Newman's star power. The story is compelling although the puppy love story is a bit artificial.

indyman12345 Never have I seen a film so boring, so downplayed, so exposition-laden, so god-awfully slow, it gives the same effect of rubbing sandpaper on your eyes. The only character worth a damn is Paul Newman's character, not only because Paul Newman is a damn good actor, but he had some generally funny scenes in this flick. Dwight Schultz on the other hand, is more or less like a dirty old rock you find on the side of the road. When he yells his lines, it's like sticking a grasshopper in your ear; unpleasant and obnoxious. The next problems with casting come down to John Cusack and Laura Dern. As for John Cusack, he just adds to the awkward blandness of the film, and it feels like a Matthew Broderick-esque performance, and you don't really feel anything for or from him, which definitely comes in to play in the second and third act. For Laura Dern, however, I feel bad that she literally only got a minimal amount of screen time, and had an even blander character than Dwight Schultz. It's a shame, because we know Laura Dern can act, and the fact that they don't really do anything with her makes it all the more disappointing.But away from the characters. This is the story of the Manhatten Project, the infamous nuclear bomb experiments. you'd think a movie about bombs would have some decent explosions in it, right? Come on, I know your inner man-child lust for destruction is begging for some fiery mushrooms in the sky! And what do we get? A couple little poofs and a nuclear explosion we barely even see. So, not only is the writing your average sandpapery boringness of a war-movie-that-doesn't-actually-have- very-much-war-in-it, not only does it have some typically boring actors besides Laura Dern and Paul Newman, and not only is this film blander than bread, it doesn't have any good explosions in it! By God, if I'm gonna watch a movie about bombs, it better show some good explosions!In conclusion, yes, this movie really should be avoided. There are definitely other movies you could watch on this subject. Hell, you could just watch a documentary on it and get the same information. So, don't bother watching it because it would be a waste of a good couple of hours, a couple hours where you could watch some actually good war movies based on WWII. Like Full Metal Jacket or Saving Private Ryan.

MARIO GAUCI An interesting – one might say, inevitable – depiction of the birth of the Nuclear age (I had watched the very first treatment of the subject, THE BEGINNING OR THE END [1947], some years back), with the title a reference to the nicknames given the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and which hastened the end of WWII. For director Joffe', it was a follow-up to two impressive movies, both similarly involved in eliciting outraged public response to man's inhumanity to his fellow man – THE KILLING FIELDS (1984) and THE MISSION (1986) – which, like the film under review, was scored by Ennio Morricone; this, however, puts the culprits rather than their victims at center-stage – while taking care to present almost every possible angle in the issue. Having said that, the film never quite moves one like it should and is awfully slow-moving to boot: at one point, the scientist ("The A-Team"'s Dwight Schulz[!], though surprisingly convincing) commissioned to work out the device tells his collaborator (John Cusack who, in a harrowing sequence, eventually becomes the first victim of the A-bomb) that they are not responsible for how their handiwork is ultimately put to use…which is utter crap if you ask me! As if to suggest that the people concerned lost something of their own along the way, we are treated to glimpses into both their domestic lives (Cusack falls for a nurse at the Los Alamos base, Laura Dern, whereas Schulz carries on relationships with two women simultaneously, wife Bonnie Bedelia and mistress Natasha Richardson – with the suicide of the latter character coming across just as futile as the recent tragic death of the actress playing her!). For the record, I acquired the film late last year around the time of its leading man's own passing, Paul Newman; he appears as the General who oversees the invention and building of the bombs and, in that respect, was not afraid to tackle a role which was obviously unsympathetic (the last shot, in which he raises his closed fist in victory to Schulz – being cheered by the crowds after the result of the bombings – but retracting in shame after recognizing the scientist's broken spirit, is telling). By the way, I have to wonder whether the film was originally intended to be longer: the cast list at the end gives reasonable prominence to the name of 1970s character actor Ed Lauter, yet he is given no more than one fleeting shot in the released version!