The Manhattan Project (1986)

A waste of 90 minutes of my life

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

In a word: annoying!For the first 45 minutes or so I kept asking myself, "Why? What does he get out of this?" A stupid science experiment and a "story" for the girl he likes. Thing is - neither of those things happen! The girl, sensibly, ends up saying "Uh, this is a bad idea." And he never even gets to do the science experiment thing, or whatever that was. Stupid movie. Another case of some douche being annoying in a typical 80s kind of way.John Lithgow is in it, he was OK. A young, cute, heterosexual Cynthia Nixon is in it. The dad from Frasier is in it, I don't even know his name or care what it is. A movie for an afternoon nap. Hopefully you fall asleep quickly so you don't have to see too much of it.4/10

Paul Stephens (Christopher Collet)'s high school science project has gotten a little out of hand. He just built an atomic bomb. Now he's got 11 hours to make sure it doesn't work.The plot was likely influenced by the case of John Aristotle Phillips, a Princeton University undergraduate, who came to prominence in 1977 as the "A-Bomb Kid" for designing a nuclear weapon in a term paper using publicly available books and articles.Roger Ebert gave the film four out of four stars and called it "a clever, funny and very skillful thriller ... that stays as close as possible to the everyday lives of convincing people, so that the movie's frightening aspects are convincing". He particularly took note of how "sophisticated" the film was about the relationship between Paul Stephens and John Matthewson, while praising Brickman's ability to "combines everyday personality conflicts with a funny, oddball style of seeing things, and wrap up the whole package into a tense and effective thriller. It's not often that one movie contains so many different kinds of pleasures." Although I am surprised that Ebert heaped such praise on this film, which seems to have been largely forgotten, I am glad that he did. The Cold War and nuclear war were common themes in the 1980s, whether the direct plot or only alluded to. And some films became huge (WarGames) and others have been forgotten. I suspect this one is largely forgotten because it lacks big name actors (with all due respect to John Lithgow). If it hasn't already been done, someone ought to get a special edition in the works...

This movie probably belongs on a lot of lists, but this belongs in the category of being a comedy, the same way that baseball should be extended to eighteen innings to better compete with golf. One list that this movie would be on would be "If it weren't for another movie, this one wouldn't have gotten made". The movie that opened the door for this one is "WarGames" which this movie has one theme in common, "How close to Armageddon are we, really?". While I did have problems with some of the movie's minor points as to how the bomb came to be built, the choice by the editors to edit out some of the more dated comments that occurred after the science fair was a good move, especially in the post-9/11 world, given the Science Fair was held in New York City.

I don't even wanna talk about it, I just wanna cut it down and leave it for dead. Or with other words, don't watch it unless you wanna make fun of it later! It's a half lame movie for little kids who haven't had a physics class yet and who's parents are willing to explain that something like that is never possible in real life. Here are some examples why (to get you started)The material being so highly concentrated I would imagine when he opens the hatch to get the jar out he'd immediately lose consciousness and die within minutes. No yellow rubber gloves are gonna protect him from the radiation.It looks like he's going for an implosion design with his bomb (like the Nagasaki bomb). That's really "smart". Especially since the gun design (Hiroshima bomb) is far easier to build, but maybe he is aware that the implosion design will have a far greater efficiency so he can incinerate far more people with it, if that's what he wants? (That's where another thought occurs: Why is he complaining about the morality of the lab when he builds a bomb of his own?) Then there is more unprotected working with the material. Even if the material was only slightly radioactive for some reason, his nice fluffy hair would have fallen out halfway through building his device. At the least we would have seen lots of vomiting! To sum it up, tired of writing this as I am, it's just all horrible anyway! I can't understand why a movie with that name couldn't have been a bit more interesting, realistic and possibly talk about the real Manhattan Project instead!