So you don't have to: Fat Man and Little Boy

[mrissa]

I didn't take the time this weekend to say that on Saturday I watched one of the worst movies I have actually watched from start to finish. Fat Man and Little Boy is a movie set at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project, featuring John Cusack and Paul Newman. "John Cusack! Manhattan Project! How could I not know this movie?" says me. Turns out here is how: it had no redeeming features. No, really. None. They cast a languid man as J. Robert Oppenheimer. Languid. I mean it. They didn't give any of the interesting physicists interesting parts, and John Cusack played Buck Weaver again. I'll bet you didn't know Buck Weaver worked on the Manhattan Project! (Note: I recognize that this is possibly only comprehensible to my folks, laurel, and snurri. Still! They gave him a different name but he dressed exactly the same as when he was Buck Weaver! And showed up carrying a bag of baseball bats! And put a baseball through Leslie Groves's window!)

I actually feel happy for Paul Newman's family, because he was trying to summon up the mean to play Groves, and he just couldn't do it. When Robin was doing a Darth Vader voice when he was three, he was more successful at Big Mean Scary Guy than Paul Newman trying to play Leslie Groves. This bodes well for his general lack of meanness, maybe? Later I thought about it and decided that if you absolutely had to cast Paul Newman at that age in a movie relating to the physics of that era, he would do for Bohr. I know Bohr was running around Copenhagen and passing out in planes on the way to England and like that rather than hanging around bugging Oppie. But still, they had scenes set in Washington, DC, and anyway having random scenes in Copenhagen or London could not possibly have made this movie worse. Having random scenes in Argentina or Burkina Faso could not possibly have made this movie worse.

You know what was the really astonishing accomplishment of this movie? They managed to get some facts correct without having the least notion of their context or meaning. So by not getting everything wrong they made some things worse, because it was mostly not the kind of bad that was howlingly funny. It was just sort of limp. It was released in 1989, which puts its creation right smack in that part of the 1980s when nobody had to justify what a movie was about if it featured vague nervousness about nuclear weapons. It was like if someone ever asked the writers or the director why the viewer should care, they repeated slowly, "But they're making a nuclear bomb. One that's nuclear. And a bomb. Which is nuclear."

Seriously. You just don't need to watch this movie.

Comments

[profrobert.livejournal.com]

Have you seen the Trial of J. Robert Oppenheimer? It's a semi-documentary with recreations, including Oppenheimer's testimony during the proceedings to lift his security clearance. David Strathairn, who I think is an awesome actor generally, INHABITS Oppenheimer. I think you'd like it (depressing though the conclusion is).

Re: Read the book instead

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I love The Making of the Atomic Bomb. I love it so much, in fact, that I am boggled to think that this thing I just watched was supposed to be a movie version of it. It just didn't occur to me.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I have not seen Desert Bloom, but no, dead people are not showing up in any audiences at the end of Fat Man and Little Boy. That might have crossed the line into hilariously bad? Maybe?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

STRATHAIRN.

Now there is a casting decision that makes sense for J. Robert Oppenheimer.

I haven't seen this. I will look into it.

[scalzi.livejournal.com]

They did a test screening of the film at the University of Chicago while I was there, believing possibly that since it was there that the first self-sustained nuclear reaction happened (by human hand, to be clear), that we would dig on the film.

We. Did. Not.

[wshaffer.livejournal.com]

Wow, after a review like that, what else could I do but go straight to Netflix and make sure that this movie was nowhere near my queue?

[reveritas.livejournal.com]

I certainly did not know that Buck Weaver had a thing to do with the Manhattan Project, but it sure got my attention.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Glad to be of service!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

That is the most interesting thing about the movie: that I could make Buck Weaver jokes. Seriously. That's all.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Well, and Cusack's character was supposed to be from Chicago.

Except that he had this comment about how when he was in Chicago he was always the smartest one, and I said unto the TV, "Nuh-uh." Because: Chicago. Immediately pre-Manhattan Project. Chicago. A few bright folks there, one might think.

[reveritas.livejournal.com]

How about Doctor Atomic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Atomic), did you see or hear of that? We saw it on its premiere. Sounds like casting could have split the difference between Mr. Languid and the guy what played Oppenheimer in the operaheimer because he was so spazzed he was freaking me out.

[avitzur.livejournal.com]

Wow! I auditioned for that while studying physics at Stanford. They came through the department inviting people to try out to add some authenticity, I suppose. One of my classmates landed a bit part as a scientist and acted as a science adviser, which may explain some of the correct facts. I never did get around to seeing, though.

[redbird]

It sounds, in fact, as though I just need not to watch this movie.

I will proceed to follow this instruction for the rest of the evening the month the 21st century.

[caoilfhionn.livejournal.com]

I had to watch that film for AP history. Sadly, we never got as far as the 1980s and were never able to discuss it as propaganda.

[songwind.livejournal.com]

I remember when this came out, and then was on HBO. I didn't watch it, though.

I think Newman must have grown out of the mean, because he did an okay job being a dickhead in The Hustler.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I didn't see it, no. But my impression of Oppenheimer is that he probably would have freaked me out a bit.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I don't even know that it was organized enough to be propaganda. It was just that kind of headless chicken, "Guh! Bad!" reaction.

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

I have seen this, and yes, the badness, it burns, it burns. Not as badly as the Demon Core, but badly enough.

Louis Slotin deserves better than John Cusack, to say nothing of Nurse! Laura! Dern!

Also, Paul Newman as Leslie Groves = WTF? Newman could play an SOB, but not the right sort of SOB*, and as for the body type issue, WTF²? It's not as if Hollywood didn't have fat guys who could play almighty SOBs on hand for this, either.

Maybe they thought Oppenheimer needed to be languid because he was (to fall back on trite terminology) an effete intellectual pinko snob, which means that he must have been a weepy slacker. Because that's the meme, don't you know.

The Making of the Atomic Bomb was good, but I think Dark Sun was even better.

*I'm trying to remember where I heard/read the description of Groves as a steamroller that knew how to use a slide rule, and I can't, not to save my life.

[laurel]

This is one of those movies where every so often I hear of it or think of it or see it listed somewhere and think "John Cusack and Paul Newman! In a movie re the Manhattan Project! That should at least be interesting" but then I always fail to actually see it. Turns out, my subconscious was smart or I was lucky or something.

I do have a tendency to enjoy flawed movies so long as they have a really interesting cast or just something else interesting about them (even a cool mood to them can work for me to a degree), but this sounds like it doesn't even work in that way. Or any way. What a waste!

Well, at least you could make jokes re Buck Weaver's involvement.

[ken-schneyer.livejournal.com]

See Doctor Atomic. Much better treatment.