The Manhattan Project (1986).

If you were born and raised at any point from the mid to early 80s, then there's a specific type of social phenomena you might recall from those glory days of childhood.  The way this scenario tends to work is you'll be going about whatever your daily routine is, and at some point or another, you decide to crash out on the couch in front of what used to be the reigning form of mass media back in the day, the television set.  It's what the Analog Generation relied on instead of Wi-Fi.  Just as younger age brackets can't fathom a life saturated with digital equipment more or less everywhere you turn, rest assured, it's still difficult for an 80s kid like me to figure out how the shows I used to watch on the Idiot Box could ever have been made in Black and White with the most primitive forms of broadcast technology imaginable.  I can even recall growing up among the detritus relics of the 40s, 50s, and 60s of my parents generation, and even with the proof of human development and the passage of time right in front of my face, it still took me a long time to put two and two together.  By the time I got old and (I hope) smart enough to be curious about all the items of days past that I came of age around, it was all too late.  Now what's left are just memories.  Anyway, part of the Analog Kid routine would be to crash in front of the Tube, and channel surf.

I'm pretty sure the process I'm about to describe is also something of a dying social practice.  It's the kind of thing that still might exist in a few household across the Nation, yet it's nowhere near the frequency it once had back in a time before the advent of Broadband.  The best way to describe it is that it was my age bracket's version of side-swiping.  The trick was that instead of just using your fingers to move the screen around, in order to make the display change, you had to use this mostly rectangular handheld device known as a TV remote control.  It was a battery-operated electrical box that fit in the palm of you hand.  It came equipped with all sorts of dials and buttons on it, some of which you used to change the channels on the television set.  The rest were all sorts of other functions that I'm sure most of us never bothered with, and so several decades of Analog Children coasted through our viewing life not knowing just what the hell all that other stuff was for.  I know I still don't, anyway.  The point is that this TV era ritual I'm talking about here would involve lounging in front of the Tube, using the remote to flip through various television channels.  One other built-in feature of those pre-Internet days is that there was a whole world of difference between the content you might have wanted to see, as opposed to whatever the broadcasters either would or could offer up to the viewing audience on the airwaves.

I can recall many occasions when I knew I'd rather be watching my favorite cartoons, and yet all channels like TNT, Nickelodeon, or the Big Three Alphabet Soup Stations had to offer were boring looking sitcoms, News at 10, or NBA matches.  As you get older, you learn to appreciate the latter, but when you're a kid, all you can think about is fun with Bugs and Daffy.  That's pretty much were my mind was at on a lot of those occasions when it seemed like there was nothing good on to watch.  This used to be something of a staple for 80s childhoods.  It was kind of like a general standard operating procedure imposed on the audience by the inherent dictates and limitations of the televisual medium. 

Sometimes, however, you got lucky, and it was here that what might be termed the Lottery flipside of TV channel surfing comes into play.  It's the shared social ritual that I'm talking about in and o itself, now.  The way it works is, sometime you'd be channel surfing the brain drain machine to see if there was anything good on, and your efforts would land you right in the middle of a snippet of action from a film you've never seen or heard of before, but that either managed to capture your interest, or else you might have wound up as one of that lucky fraternity of 80s kids who accidentally scarred themselves when the TV channel you flipped onto showed you the kind of films where it was clear the violence and gore levels were aimed squarely at the adults, and not the eyes and ears of little pitchers.  I've been on the receiving end of both sides of the channel surfing equation, and sometimes even the surprise discoveries that had me running for safety behind the couch have become longtime favorites as (what we must be jokingly referring to whenever we choose to describe ourselves as) an adult.  The film I want to talk about here today was one such example of a channel surfing catch.  It belongs to the former category of films caught in passing that can be described as Intriguing, rather than the latter section now known affectionately as Kindertrauma.  This was back during the 90s, on the Disney Channel.

I think the TV might have just been left turned on to that station, rather than any effort at channel surfing on my part, yet what I know for sure is that at some point during the end of the day, I came into my room, noticed the TV was on, and I saw Dr. Dick Solomon, from 3rd Rock From the Sun, helping this teenage Brat Pack looking kid (kind of a Ferris Bueller wannabe, if that makes sense) to make his way safely out of a military facility.  Both men had guns aimed in their direction, and they were carrying a fully loaded and armed nuclear device between the two of them. For better or worse, that's the sort of thing you might chance to happen upon if you came of age during the final glory days of broadcast television.  You could run across something that scared the wits out of you, or else be left thinking along the same lines I did when I saw Emilio Lizardo and Frasier Crane's dad in a race against a ticking nuclear clock as they tried to disarm a nuclear bomb before they all went up in atomized smoke.  In my case, that was the kind of cinematic scenario that left me thinking, "Well now that sounds interesting.  Too bad I just caught the tale end of this flick, though.  Sounds like it could be a lot of fun".  When an occurrence like this happens, a number of things can result with the viewer here.

It's like you're faced with a choice, if that's how you want it.  You can decide to let what you've just seen go as a nice yet momentary bit of diversion.  Just something to enjoy in passing, and not the kind of thing you need to give any further thought.  On the other hand, you can come away fascinated by just a few snippets of film caught in passing, to the point where you make a semi-unofficial vow to yourself to make sure and hunt down a copy of the movie to watch in full, so that you can get a clearer picture of what you just saw.  This is what happened in my case.  The ending of the film had just enough of the right of sort of nail-biter quality to it that it managed to leave a good impression in my mind.  It also didn't hurt that I could tell there was a nice bit of humor inscribed within the the film's writing, at least based on what I had seen of it in media res, and walking in blind.  It created just enough of the right sort of positive impact in my mind that the picture has always managed to linger around in the back of my thoughts.  It didn't take me too long to realize that the reason it kept hanging around was that some part of me was always curious to see the rest of the picture from start to finish.  So, recently, with nothing much on my plate, I sat down a re-watched a 1986 comedy, The Manhattan Project for the first time.

The Story.  

At the heart of this film lies the character of Paul Stephens (Christopher Collet).  The first thing that strikes a modern viewer about this guy is just how familiar he seems.  80s movie buffs will recognize the tropes that go together to make up our protagonist for the evening.  He's the child of a divorced household living with his mother Elizabeth (Jill Eikenberry).  She's holding herself together well enough, yet there are certain scenes that imply she might have picked up a bit of a smoking habit as a means of dealing a lot of the stress the ending of her marriage has placed her under.  This all causes the second unspoken motivation for the film's main lead.  He's a high school student who does well enough in his classes, yet there's also this familiar restless, angry energy about him that tends to make him act out every now and then.  His folks divorce has pretty much left him with the sense of being tossed adrift without any clear sense of direction, and all he can think to do with this situation is be at odds with the establishment that bore, bred, and raised him.  All of these character traits go together to paint a very familiar picture from the glory days of Gen X.  It's clear right away the film is trying to cast itself in the mold of a John Hughesian Brat Pack style teen dramady.  It's trying to be the kind of picture, in other words, focusing on young protagonists trying to gain their footing in an often hostile adult world.

The key thing to remember about this is that even if the formula the film has to work with is familiar, this in itself is neither a good nor bad thing.  The quality of movies like this all depend on how well the notes are played in the end.  Relying on a format as familiar by now as the Brat Pack can create an overall decent viewing experience when done right.  If that weren't the case, then it wouldn't have been possible for filmmakers like Hughes to have a lucrative string of successes from playing that same note in different keys such as Pretty in Pink or The Breakfast Club.  It wouldn't have even been possible for actors like Keanu Reeves to carve out a name for himself with Brat Pack adjacent vehicles like The Night Before and Bill and Ted.  Even films like Fast Times at Ridgemont High would have impossible without help from the popularity of the whole 80s Brat Pack ethos.  It's clear that Collet's main lead is meant to be seen as existing within the same tradition of the rebellious Gen X protagonist established by Hughes.  The way Paul is written for the film makes him come off as what you might get if you took Ferris Bueller and melded him together with one of the Tri-Lambs from Revenge of the Nerds.  The final result of such a warped science experiment is a protagonist who is both insider and outsider all at once.

Paul finds himself existing in this strange liminal space at his high school.  It's a mistake to claim he's not one of the popular crowd.  Yet he doesn't seem to have the same level of respect from his peers that Ferris does.  He's a genuine science nerd, and while there's the impression that this does eat away at some of his reputation with the student body as a whole, it's not enough to make him an outcast.  He's almost what you'd get if Cameron Frye had something of an act together.  He's one of the in-crowd, yet he's probably somewhere in the middle, as opposed to being at the top of the food chain.  He's also way more down to Earth than any of the Tri-Lambs ever could be.  It's easy to imagine someone like Paul living on an ordinary suburban street.  Speaking of his home life, the movie does a good job of showing us the protagonist's backstory, as opposed to just telling us flat out.  He has just a few scenes with his mother, Elizabeth (Jill Eikenberry), and one of the strengths the film demonstrates is its use of stage setting and incidental gestures from the characters that let the viewer infer a lot of major information that drives the motivations and choices of the film's cast.  The way that Paul and Liz display a clear love for one another that also has a note of distance to it is a clue that things aren't all that great at home.

The way that Liz keeps lighting up cigarettes for herself in a strained and compulsive manner hints that she's been under some sort of personal stress for some time now, despite being the successful owner of a real estate business.  It isn't until Lithgow's Dr. John Mathewson arrives in town and goes to Liz's realtor office to see about finding a place to stay that she casually mentions in passing that the reason she doesn't mind when Lithgow's character starts putting the moves on her is because she and her former husband are divorced.  There's this underlying intelligence that the film has in the ways it conveys this information to the audience which helps make the movie stand better than it otherwise might have.  In this case it helps explain that a lot of the reason for Paul's rebellious streak comes from a lingering feeling of parental neglect and abandonment.  It's the reason he's been walking a moral tightrope between being a reasonable student while also being something of a high school hustler.  Whatever anger and resentments he feels towards his parents is taken out in various passive aggressive ways that make him something of a blueprint for the type of characterizations that Matt Groening would later take and apply to Bart Simpson in a highly stylized and amplified way.  The film's director, Marshall Brickman, chooses to take all these prototype elements, and play them in a more normal key.

This is the basic setup, and the life that our protagonist has been leading when the curtain rises on the drama.  The plot's main action is kicked off once Lithgow's Dr. Mathewson arrives on the scene and begins to take a fancy to Paul's mom.  Once again, the script is clever in how it handles the dynamics that begin to develop between the film's two main leads.  Paul makes sure to keep a polite front going with his mother and her new fling, yet Collet's performance is good at conveying the bitter anger lurking just behind his smile as he watches his mom move on from the life she had with his ex-dad as if it's nothing, when it's clear it still means something to him.  This creates an automatic antagonism between Paul Mathewson that the good doctor tries to alleviate by getting the lad to warm up to him.  Part of this strategy involves John taking Paul to see the place where he works as part of a pharmaceutical company, the kind of where they make the sort of dyes and gels that go into shampoo and ladies compact kits.  It's while he's showing the protagonist around that Mathewson makes at least three vital mistakes.  The first was making Paul realize the scale and defense of the business.  It isn't just some boring manufacturer's job.  This place is massive, and locked down almost as tight as Fort Knox.

The second slipup is when Mathewson introduces Paul to the facility's state of the art laser technology that you can use to either drill a hole through solid steel, or else light up a good Havana cigar.  The third a crucial mistake was in letting Paul catch sight of where they store all the chemicals that they work with, and it's this major takeaway plus some words with a significant other that determines what happens next.  The whole problem might be stated through a series of questions.  For instance, if you're just a commercial company that helps to put stuff in baby shampoo or the kind of makeup his mom applies to her face on a daily basis before she sets out for work, then what need would any of you have for a genuine "freakin' laser", for gosh sake?  Also, if the stuff you're working with is just for home and office care products, what need it there to store it away behind an intricate series of escape proof seals, like you're dealing with some kind of hazardous material?  The kind of stuff you put in hair gel can be safely stored in a cabinet under your own work desk.  There's also one final thing that Paul notices as he's looking over the grounds of the facility.  The lawn is dotted with five instead of four-leaf clovers.

That sort of thing just isn't natural.  Or if it is, then there's only one way mutations like that can ever occur.  It's if there's a strong agent capable of generating enough force to cause the flora, and sometimes even the fauna, to shift ever so slightly out of the natural course of things.  The best candidate for such mutation was and remains just one element, Plutonium.  The more he keeps putting all the pieces together, the greater Paul's conviction that Mathewson is running some kind of secret nuclear lab right her in his otherwise quiet hometown.  When he brings his suspicions to his girlfriend Jenny Anderman (Cynthia Nixon) the movie once again demonstrates its skill at character delineation with the help of a few simple brushstrokes combining background and mannerisms.  All it takes is one look at Jenny's house to realize a number of things.  1. The layout of the place makes you realize that her folks are most likely Hippies.  2. Without ever spelling this detail out loud, it's made clear that Jenny's interactions with Paul and others indicates that she shares the same values as her parents.  3. While this is never gone into in any detail, there is something heartwarming in the way it indicates that Jenny has a close and loving relationship with her mom and dad.  That the movie posits her as the positive flipside of Paul's broken home.  It's how she reacts to the news Paul brings that kicks the whole main action into the high gear.

As a journalist in training, she demands that they get someone at the facility to spill the beans, get the word out through publication.  Her plans at that moment extend no farther than the obvious one of finding all the right ways of shutting that whole facility down, so that the risk of the next Three Mile Island gets averted.  Paul, however, diverts this plan into a scheme of his own.  His objective becomes simple on paper.  He wants to find a way to get inside the testing facility at night, when there's almost no one around.  From there, he'll try and see if he can break into the storage place where they house all the actual Plutonium, and then smuggle some of it out, without Mathewson or anyone else there being none the wiser.  From there, he'll take the stuff home, and see if he can't make a legitimate nuclear reactor for part of a science fair project.  Perhaps to his own shock, Paul's hair-brained scheme manages to work.  The problem for the would-be nuclear prodigy is that even the best laid plans still have a way of having consequences.  In the case of the stolen Plutonium, it means our hero has to face up to the fact that now Mathewson and a sizeable chunk of military and intelligence forces are coming after him.  As his plans cause a ripple effect in the adult world around him, Paul just might be way in over his head.

Conclusion: An Intriguing Idea with a Problematic Execution.

I've found myself having to deal with at least three, maybe four competing viewpoints when it comes to dealing with this picture.  The first two are reactions from the critics.  The third is what the film's director has to say about his goals for the movie, and the ostensible fourth is my own reaction to how all of this shapes up in my own mind.  I think it's best to treat the three points above in the order they're listed, starting with what the critics have to say.  There are two in particular who seem worth paying the most attention to.  One of them stems from an anonymous review posted on the YouTube vlog Past America.  While the second comes from the writings of Roger Ebert.  In between their two reactions stands the artistic testimony of Marshall Brickman, the film's director, and me having to sort it all out.  Starting with the YouTube review, Past makes the claim that the film's main problem is best described as a tonal issue, stemming as it does from the nature of the film's script.  He says that "Audiences never knew whether to laugh or be terrified by a high school student casually constructing nuclear weapons in his garage.  When The Manhattan Project hit theaters in June, 1986, the timing seemed absolutely perfect.  This was peak Cold War nuclear anxiety, just months after Chernobyl had terrified the world.

"Films like Wargames and The Day After had proven audiences were hungry for nuclear themed entertainment.  Reagan era fears about atomic warfare dominated popular culture, and here was a smart thriller that brought those fears right into suburban America.  With a modest 8 million dollar budget, and backing from 20th Century Fox, the film seemed positioned for success.  Instead, it managed on $4.200,000,000 at the domestic box office.  That catastrophic performance killed any hopes of establishing nuclear thrillers as viable teenage entertainment.  So", the Past America vlog finds itself asking, "what went wrong?  How did a film with perfect timing, scientific authenticity, and genuine talent manage to bomb so spectacularly"?  As far the Past vlog is concerned, a great deal of the film's issues stems from its commitment to scientific accuracy, if that makes any sense.  I know there's this dramatic Literalist tendency among audiences to want to applaud any time a film gets the logic of a significant technical matter right and is able to apply that knowledge in a smart way to a film's narrative.  Yet here's the kicker, according Past, it was the same dedication to detail that gave The Manhattan Project its devastating lukewarm review.  Director Brickman went to all that trouble of interviewing and collaborating with the actual Los Alamos scientists who made the first atomic bomb.

It was their ongoing input into the script which guarantees the legitimate scientific overlay that carries the film from its first to last shot.  Yet according to Past America, "here's where the film's greatest strength became its biggest weakness.  The realistic approach made nuclear weapons feel genuinely dangerous, rather than entertainingly thrilling.  Audiences expecting Teen Adventure", in the same vein as Back to the Future or Weird Science, "got legitimate atomic terror, instead.  The scientific accuracy that impressed experts alienated moviegoers who wanted escapist entertainment".  Here's where Past starts to get into the real fine details of where he believes the film goes wrong.  "The tonal confusion", he says, "starts with the premise itself.  A teenager building nuclear weapons should be either pure comedy, or serious thriller.  The Manhattan Project tries to be both, simultaneously.  Comedy scenes feel inappropriate given the genuine danger.  Serious moments get undermined by teenage hijinks.  Brickman's comedy writing background shows in the dialogue, but comedy doesn't mix well with Plutonium theft, and nuclear terrorism.  The film wants audiences to laugh at teenage ingenuity, while being terrified of atomic annihilation.  These emotional responses work against each other, rather than compliment each other.  The performances in The Manhattan Project reveal talented actors struggling with a script that couldn't decide what kind of movie it wanted to be". 

Here's where the comments made by the film's director, Marshall Brickman, can help to fill in the gaps of PA's critique.  According to him, the whole thing kicked off at a very specific sounding point in his career.  I'm not sure, yet the way Brickman describes things almost makes it sound like Inspiration might have struck during a mid-life crisis sort of moment.  "After making Lovesick, Brickman was interested in doing something other than comedy.  "Jokes are easy," he said. "Humor comes to me so easily I'm suspicious of it. I secrete jokes like the pancreas secretes...whatever the pancreas secretes. I wanted character, I wanted to go for the emotions that the kid feels, that the scientist feels; I wanted the audience to feel the seductiveness of machinery." The funning thing about what happened next is that it almost sounds as if Brickman caught himself a bit of the same idea that later caused Christopher Nolan to make a film like Oppenheimer.  "He chose the Manhattan Project. However he decided against doing something historical because "It's such a monster to do, the scope is so enormous – I couldn't come up with a viable way to make it that wouldn't cost under $60 million to produce." He instead decided to do something in a contemporary setting which dealt with the same themes".  Here is where I think Brickman comes as close as he can to explaining where his mind was at while he was filmmaking.

He says that, "I became fascinated with the two worlds that coexist in America now," he says. "The one world of ordinary citizens, like the kid in the movie who has all the concomitant problems of adolescence – sex and girls and school and then the other world, which is the world of the military–industrial complex, and within that world the sort of high-priesthood of nuclear-weapons planners and designers. You read through the books and these guys are really creepy: scary and fascinating, and very brilliant and very elitist and very condescending to the rest of the world. And very divorced from any sense of consequence, from any sense of ethics or morality." He also thought "it might be a good idea to approach the bomb as another consumer item, which in a sense it is. You know, it provides a lot of jobs, a lot of work, and ironically a lot of good side-effects (web)".  It has to be admitted that Brickman's words do give a fair amount of food for thought.  Right now, the biggest train of ideas they've set going in my mind might be surprising, though it really isn't once you stop and think it over for a bit.  It's all to do with an observation made by singer-songwriter Eric Woolfson, one of the founder band members of the Alan Parson's Project.  He once spoke of how there is often a cutoff point between the worlds of science, and that of the public square and sector, just as an almost natural way of how things are.

The songwriter once claimed that he wanted one of the band's albums to focus on "the possible misunderstanding of industrial scientific developments from a public perspective and a lack of understanding of the public from a scientific perspective (web)". Woolfson's point is that there was and remains a vast gulf between how the ordinary person on the street tends to view the world of science, and how that same province is viewed by the people doing the actual scientific research, and the complications that can result from such misunderstandings.  It's worth keeping Wolfson's thoughts in mind as we go back to Past America's critique of the picture in light of the director's own commentary for what he was trying to achieve with his own attempt at a Brat Pack feature.  PA maintains that "John Lithgow anchors the film (as) Mathewson, the conflicted scientist developing weapon's grade Plutonium.  Lithgow brings his trademark intensity to every scene.  He understands that Mathewson isn't a villain, but a man caught between scientific duty, and moral conscience.  Watch Lithgow in his early scenes, with Paul's mother.  He's genuinely trying to build a relationship while hiding his dangerous work.  Lithgow sells the internal conflict without over-playing the drama.  He makes government secrecy feel like a personal burden, rather than plot convenience.  But the script never decides whether Mathewson is hero, villain, or something in between.  

"Christopher Collet delivers a committed performance as...the teenage genius who steals Plutonium, and builds an atomic bomb.  Collet effectively balances extraordinary intelligence with typical adolescent impulsiveness.  His Paul feels like a real teenager who happens to understand nuclear physics.  The performance works because Collet never makes Paul feel like an adult in a young body.  The problem is that Paul's motivations keep shifting throughout the film.  Sometimes he's motivated by scientific curiosity.  Other times, he's driven by anti-government rebellion.  Occasionally, he seems motivated by romantic showing-off.  Collet does his best with" what PA believes to be "these inconsistencies, but even his considerable talent can't create coherent character development from confused writing".  It's the critic's awareness of the script, and it's centrality to the quality of the film that forces me to applaud Past America in these moments of his video.  Regardless of whether I'm able to sustain or deconstruct his judgement in the end, it's this awareness of the importance of the narrative proper over all other considerations which singles out his review of this film as one of the most important and informative I've seen in a long while.  Perhaps the most interesting thing about the film's plot is that it is kicked off by what is otherwise a legitimate expression of moral outrage on the part of Cynthia Nixon's character.

It's Jenny who provides the essentially correct moral lens from which to judge the idea of the Government trying to build a nuclear testing facility right in the backyard of suburban America, and then try and keep it a secret from the public.  Not only is there too much of a risk factor involved in terms of dealing with hazardous material like the threat of radiation poisoning, it also turns out that real life itself has proven to be a very effective teacher when it comes to the folly of such human arrogance.  Way back in 1968, there was a nerve agent leakage from an Army chemical weapons facility at the Dugway Proving Ground, in Utah.  This leak caused a deadly chemical substance to be released into the atmosphere, killing an entire herd of farm sheep.  The strange thing is how luck was on humanity's side in the incident.  If the wind has been blowing in the wrong direction, then at the very least, an entire town of Utah citizens could have been in a whole world of trouble, hurt, and heartache.  The incident has left enough of an impact in pop culture as the Inspiration for Michael Crichton's The Andromeda Strain, and Stephen King's The Stand (web).  Jenny's motivations seems to stem from this viewpoint.

If there's any truth to this speculation, then one thing in Manhattan Project's favor is that it is operating from a clear and distinct ethical perspective.  It isn't just flying by the seat of the pants, here.  The director does have a clear moral center that he's operating from.  Even if this is the case, however, Past America keeps pointing out flaws in the script's execution.  The problem, as he sees it, is that "Jenny exists mainly to provide exposition and moral objections.  Nixon does excellent work with limited material, but her character never develops beyond "Concerned Girlfriend", who questions the hero's dangerous choices".  Indeed, it could be said that part of the problem with the film is that it takes what should be a simple, cut-and-dried moral stance and then needlessly complicates it by letting the complicated figure of Paul be the story's main vehicle for delivering its message.  It sort of begs the ironic question that if it's clear Jenny is supposed to be the films moral center, then why not let her be the main lead?  Make her the actual hero of the story, and have the plot focus on her crusade to expose Mathewson and the government's shenanigans.  Make the whole into a kind of John Hughes version of The China Syndrome.  It would streamline everything, and make the plot more audience friendly.

Instead, as PA observes, "The script uses her intelligence to explain nuclear concepts to the audience, rather than developing her as an individual".  With that said, Past also concedes that "The film's most effective sequence showcases the entire cast working together.  It's the...standoff where Paul threatens to detonate his bomb unless his demands are met.  The scene attempts to balance comedy with genuine nuclear terror.  Lithgow shows Mathewson's scientific respect for Paul's achievement.  Collet demonstrates Paul's growing realization of what he's actually created.  Nixon conveys Jenny's absolute terror at the situation.  But even this climactic scene suffers from tonal confusion.  Are we supposed to admire Paul's scientific achievement, or be horrified by nuclear terrorism"?  For what it's worth, the climactic showdown in the power plant is the one moment, for me, at least, where all of the discordant elements somehow manage to come together well enough.  It's as if the film has managed to find something of a happy medium after what has been a long and  difficult struggle to find its true footing.  In this sequence, its as if the spirit of Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove has entered the building, and for a few moments, the shadow it casts over Brickman's material is able to cooperate with, rather than overshadow it.  The film's mordant strain of black humor finds its natural outlet amidst high tension.

It's the one moment where I'm willing to step aside from PA's outlook and say that here, at least, things start to gel kind of the way the director was probably hoping for.  It's when the scene ends, however, and things start to wrap up, that all of the the previous issues that have defined the picture up till now come rushing back in.  The looming shadow of Strangelove stops being a helpful collaborator, and goes back to being the shadow that Brickman can't quite escape from, and is ultimately defeated by, and it's very much as the Past America video has it.  "The actors commit fully to their roles, but the script won't commit to a consistent emotional approach".  The vlog then offers up an interesting reason for why the film suffers as a whole.  "Here's the casting story that explains the film's problems.  Lithgow was hired specifically to bring dramatic weight to what could have been purely comedic material.  His presence was meant to ground the more outlandish elements in an emotional reality.  But not even Lithgow's considerable talents could resolve the fundamental script problems that made every character feel split between comedy and drama.  The critical reception of The Manhattan Project tells the story of a film that confused everyone who watched it.  Roger Ebert gave it two and a half stars out of four.

"He wrote that, 'The film wants to be both a comedy and a thriller, and succeeds at being neither'.  Ebert appreciated the scientific authenticity, but found the tonal shifts jarring.  His review captured the general critical consensus perfectly.  Variety was harsher in their assessment.  They called it, 'an uneasy mixture of teenage hi-jinks and nuclear terror that never finds its proper tone'.  The Hollywood Reporter noted the impressive technical research, but questioned whether audiences would embrace such an uncomfortable premise.  Critics could see what Brickman was attempting, but couldn't ignore how often it misfired.  The fil faced immediate controversy over it's potentially dangerous content.  Nuclear physicists who praised the scientific accuracy began questioning whether showing realistic bomb construction was responsible.  Some educators worried the film might inspire actual teenage bomb building attempts.  The very authenticity that made it special also made it genuinely concerning.  Parents were completely confused about the film's target audience.  The teenage protagonists suggested family entertainment, but the nuclear terrorism themes were clearly too intense for younger viewers.

"The PG-13 rating didn't help clarify whether this was appropriate for actual teenagers.  Marketing struggled to position a film that defied easy categorization.  Audiences were equally divided and confused.  Teenagers expecting typical 1980s adventure found uncomfortable nuclear anxiety, instead.  Adult thriller fans couldn't take teenage protagonists seriously when dealing with atomic weapons. The film fell into that deadly middle ground where it satisfied nobody completely (ibid)".  The film's performance at the box-office is able to backup these conclusions, yet here's the real strange twist to all of that commentary.  In preparation for this review, I decided to do the extra homework by going to read what Roger Ebert had to say about this film in the hopes it would add something to my thoughts on the matter.  I logged onto his old website which is still running as of this date, and found the review in question.  I thought I was going to read that very same brief yet informative takedown that PA talks about in his own review.  What I got was about the last thing I expected.  "This is not", Ebert informs us, "another one of those teenage movies about bright kids and science projects. There have been some good movies in that genre – I liked “WarGames” and “Real Genius” – but this isn’t really a teenage movie at all, it’s a thriller. And it’s one of those thrillers that stays as close as possible to the everyday lives of convincing people, so that the movie’s frightening aspects are convincing (web)".

A little further on in the review, the former TV review host writes of how, "I love it when movies get very detailed about clever schemes for outsmarting people. “The Manhattan Project” invites us to figure out things along with Collet, as he uses his girlfriend as a decoy and outsmarts the security guards at the plant. Inside, he has it all figured out: how to baffle the automatic alarms, how to anticipate what the guards are going to do, how to get in and out without being detected".  It goes without saying that I'm left sort of confused by what Ebert writes under his own name, and the information that Past America gives on the vlog review.  Here, for instance, are Ebert's final conclusions on the picture.  "This movie announces" Brickman's "arrival into the first ranks of skilled American directors. It’s a tour de force, the way he combines everyday personality conflicts with a funny, oddball style of seeing things, and wraps up the whole package into a tense and effective thriller. It’s not often that one movie contains so many different kinds of pleasures (ibid)".  Rather than waste time over the obvious question of who has the correct information, it's best if I just try and sort through all this background material, and see if I can make up my own mind about just how well a film like The Manhattan Project holds up at this time.

My own two cents keeps revolving around a number of things the director has said about his goals for this film.  In particular, I keep circling back to what Brickman said about the initial basic idea that got him interested in taking on this project.  He said he was getting interested in the actual, historical Manhattan Project, in and of itself.  To put this into perspective, it more or less amounts to someone wanting to tackle the subject of Oppenheimer long before Chris Nolan ever arrived on the scene, or much less had the idea to do the same thing, except this time he had the clout and eventual budget to back those ambitions up.  Brickman, in contrast, might have liked the idea as a movie, yet he also seems to have been aware of his own limitations as an artist in this regard.  If that's the case, then it's easy to see why.  By his own admission, Brickman is a comedian at heart.  He spent the vast majority of his career trying to make people laugh.  All of which sort of makes it funny as hell when you consider a guy like him thinking he can tackle anything to do with the construction of the world's first atomic bomb.  If there's a logical calculus to that train of thought then I'll have to admit it escapes me at the moment.

Right away, just on a conceptual level, the idea of a humorist trying to tackle the history behind Oppenheimer is one of those ideas where I can't see how it works even on paper.  Now this is not to say that the fears and zeitgeist engendered by the real Manhattan Project can't be taken and made into an effective subject for comedy on its own, as a separate yet related topic.  Stanley Kubrick proved it was more than possible to do that well once the artist has found the right means of approach to such material.  The irony here is that it's also to Brickman's credit that he sort of knew he could never even measure up to the guy who gave us Full Metal Jacket.  He could do comedy at the drop of a hat, yet it was always on a shelf or so below what Kubrick and Peter Sellars achieved together.  It also maybe doesn't help that one interpretation for Brickman's motivations at that time was that he maybe could have been going through a bit of a mid-life crisis, and perhaps was desperate to prove to himself that he could tackle something different, like a story that required a certain amount of seriousness?  This is pure conjecture, yet even it that's the case, even just as a supposal, I think going back and listening to the tone of Brickman's words makes it clear that the guy still talks like a habitual comic talent.  There's this whole wise guy ambience to his style of speaking which means he can't keep serious for very long.

Guys like him are always going to be more comfortable writing gags, then tackling deep existential issues of morality in its relation to genius and the promise and threats of technology.   You're going to need someone like Marshall McLuhan rather than Brickman for a topic like that.  It's to the director's credit that he seems to have always been aware of this personal shortcoming on some level.  Because even before he so much as got busy penning a single line of dialogue, he made the choice (wise or otherwise) to switch to a format he was always more suited to.  The punchline here is just this.  When he chose to switch from drama to 80s Brat Pack comedy, the basic initial idea seems to have remained the same.  Brickman still wanted to tackle the ideas and personalities behind the historic Manhattan Project.  All he did was just reshuffle the deck chairs just a bit so that the names have been changed less to protect either the guilty or the innocent, and more to make sure the director was working in a familiar comfort zone.  What that seems to have meant in practice is that Brickman took his idea of who the real J. Robert Oppenheimer was, and then tried to see if he could transfigure that whole life and personality into the otherwise made up persona of a 80s Teen Movie protagonist.  I already have some questions.

The punchline is all of it amounts to agreeing with Tom Cruise.  "Sometimes you've just got to say, what fuck"?  The whole thing is already starting to sound less than promising to me just at the writer's room level of things.  In actual practice, it's this knowledge that the director was trying to take the same subject matter that Nolan tackled years later, and turning it into a John Hughes knock-off that explains a very specific complaint I've heard lodged at this film.  It isn't about questions of tone and subject matter, but rather one of character.  This specific criticism holds that the film's main lead displays behavioral patterns that could very classify him as a budding sociopath, or sorts.  In the movie, Paul Stevens is the kind of guy who thinks mixing classroom chemicals to plant a prank smoke bomb in the desk drawer of one of his science class rivals is a fun idea of a joke.  Bear in mind, this is something that happens way before he finds out that John Lithgow has a nuclear testing facility almost right in his backyard.  We're living in a time now where I'm sure the terrifying implications of such behaviors and skill sets is enough of a red flag on its own.  Now the director thinks its a good idea to make this person the protagonist.

Brickman then has the audacity to allow this figure to be seen as the hero of the plot, someone we're supposed to root for in the same way we would for Ducky from Pretty in Pink.  The complete and total ironic discovery I've made is that all of the main character's actions and motivations begin to make perfect, albeit still horrific sense once you remember that all Brickman has done is to take the personalities and life goals of figures from the actual Manhattan Project, and transmogrified a handful of them into the typical John Hughes setting.  Therefore its not out of bounds to wonder or at least take the vantage point that the figure of Paul Stevens is really just Oppenheimer refashioned as a Brat Pack main lead.  Rather let's say it's Brickman's awkward attempt at trying to take a very complex figure from history, and seeing how well he does as a Shermer High School extra.  At the very least, I'd argue that this perspective not only helps us get a grasp on Paul's characterization, it also highlights what really went wrong with this picture.  It all seems to have come down to the way Brickman conceived of Oppenheimer as a person.  If Paul is meant to be the director's attempt a humanizing the real scientist, then he somehow hit upon the idea that making him into the next Emilio Estevez was the way to do it.

The problem with this approach is that it rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of the historical subject.  Oppenheimer isn't someone you can just root for, at the end of the day.  Instead, he's more one of those protagonists that you just observe from a cautious distance, in much the same way you would of a tragic figure in a Shakespeare play, because that's pretty much the logic at work here, whether on the stage or the real world.  The one motivation that Paul and Oppenheimer share in common is a belief that they know more than others.  That they understand the secrets of the universe, and are very close to unlocking it.  The real scientist and the fictional teenager are both bound together by the same shared sense of hubris.  They're operating under the assumption that they've achieved their own special Parnassus.  A vantage point which allows them to stand apart from the crowd of mere mortals due to their superior intellect.  The entire crux of Oppenheimer's story is that he bet his whole career that he knew how to harness the very fabric of reality in his favor.  It's an assumption that he let power his ambitions through the entirety of his university days, all the way up to his work on the Bomb.  The great crisis of the man's life came when he was able to achieve the very dreams he aspired to in the first place.  Once he'd done this, he soon realized what it was like to be chasing a nightmare all his life.

The whole point of Robert Oppenheimer's life was the existential realization that morality is an actual thing, something to do with choice and life or death consequences, sometimes for millions, that conditions the very nature of the human psyche.  I suppose you might say it was the second biggest scientific discovery of his life, and it sort of ended him, in a way.  There's the real crux of the Manhattan Project.  It's the main message of Oppenheimer's life, whether on or off the screen.  These are the themes and subjects that Brickman should have concentrated on if he ever wanted to tackle material like this.  It's what makes Nolan's efforts such a standout success by comparison.  Brickman's film, by contrast, is stuck with the shadow of two giants looming over it.  One of them belongs to Nolan, the other to Kubrick.  He seems to have been trying to take the same strategy used in Strangelove, and apply it back onto the history from which his own film sprang.  In doing so, I think he ran up against the obvious fact that what can be funny when taken as a purely fictional scenario doesn't hold up when trying to paste it onto a piece of very serious history.  It's kind of why Nolan stuck to history as drama.

So far as its a question of Inspiration, aside from the real Oppenheimer and the actual Project, it also seems that the plot was "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 (ibid)".  However, what has to be kept in mind here is that none of it went as far as Brickman's film.  Aristotle Phillips only limited himself to a speculative scenario as part of an academic paper.  He never went out and became a bloody terrorist, for Heaven's sake!  If anything, Phillips was trying to give the public a warning of how such follies could come about.  Indeed, come to think of it, that in and of itself would make for the setup of a better protagonist if it's someone who knows the threat that such a device can have in human hands, and so sets about trying to make sure it can't happen.  It's loads better than what Chris Collet has to put up with.

There are two other quotes from the director that sort of help put the nature of his film into perspective for me.  One is where he says that "he wanted to "show that the kid, just like the scientists, is seduced by the technology. It's like a form of chicken: How close can I come to the edge here? I wanted to show how you could get embroiled without any regard to consequences. Which is what happened to the guys involved in the original Manhattan Project. They became hooked; they were just too far into it (ibid)."  If you stop and think it over, what the filmmaker has just given us in the quote above is nothing less than his two cents on the nature of Oppenheimer and his Project.  It's a fair enough assessment, so far as it goes.  Though as Nolan's film demonstrates, there's still a lot more to explore on the topic.  Brickman isn't incorrect in his judgment call, so much as he doesn't go far enough the way the later film does. His opinion is better suited to the endpoint to be arrived at, rather than the necessary starting point and development needed to build up to this otherwise logical conclusion.  Perhaps that's a clue to another aspect of why this film doesn't work as a commentary on real life.  The filmmaker is in too much of a rush to get an otherwise solid point across that he doesn't stop to make a correct story argument.

There's one other statement Brickman made about his intention for the movie, and out of all the comments he's made about the flick, this is the one that seems to get closest to the truth about why the final result is less than hoped for.  He says, "I was afraid people would say I ripped off the subject," Brickman said. "That I trivialized it, that I took a less serious view – that I just used the subject to get some laughs (web)".  There's an interesting, tell-tale note of lingering indecision about that statement.  If this is how the director feels about his work years after the fact, then it is not entirely out of bounds to speculate that this same indecision is what carries over into the final product on some level.  The best explanation I can offer on why that might be is because as he got into the actual work of bringing the story to life, Brickman may have become acutely aware of where his strengths as an artist end, and all of his limitations as an "artiste" began.  By his own admission, he's a funny man at heart.  He's at his best when trying to get a laugh out of his audience.  It might still have been possible for the guy to make a film like this work, yet it would had to have been something different than what we've got here.  In terms of constructive criticism, the best I can offer would be to make a particular rewrite of the plot.

Get rid of Paul, and let the focus of the film be on Jenny and Mathewson.  This version would basically make Lithgow's character a closer analogue to the real Oppenheimer.  He's a man driven by his obsessions, most of which center around questions of science in its relation to "Becoming a Name", rather than any possibility for either understanding or bettering the nature of our world.  Let Jenny be the child of a divorced household, so that it's her mother that Lithgow's character starts to develop unexpected, yet genuine feelings for.  Let Jenny be the one he tries to ingratiate himself to because he's trying to make an effort to show he's a good guy.  Let Jenny have basically the same role she does in the film.  She's this liberal minded girl studying to be journalist, yet let her also have Paul's scientific savvy so that she's able to put two plus together when Mathewson shows her around the facility.  From there, the plot goes in a different yet similar direction as she tries to call out the plot's symbolic Oppenheimer on the dangers of trying to play God with Plutonium in the backyard of Main Street USA.  Instead of Plutonium being stolen, let Jenny's fears be realized when a near radiation leak almost occurs, and the event is able to jolt Mathewson out of his complacency.  The rest of the plot could go as follows.

Mathewson and Jenny decide to team up to expose the Government's secrets just by him coming clean in a public statement to the press, with Jenny's help.  The major hurdle is that now Mathewson's bosses are trying to silence him, and the rest of the plot is an exciting thriller race against time to see if Lithgow can put the word out before its too late.  It's not much, yet it at least makes for a more palatable sounding idea than what we ended up with here.  In the final analysis, what we've got on our hands is a film with perhaps too much of a mixed message for its own good.  It's a combination of the artist managing to get hold of a maybe good idea, and then discovering that perhaps not all of his talents are up to such a complex task in execution.  The end result is a film with this odd, schizoid quality to its nature.  Brickman wants to take the ideas of Oppenheimer and Strangelove and see if he can find a happy middle ground where both are able to exist in the same package.  I'm not sure how much that counts as a lofty goal, if I'm being honest.  The one other element that keeps me from giving the film anything like a passing grade has to do with the way Brickman presents and handles the main lead.

He's a very problematic character, at best.  Part of it is down to the less than ideal facts of history.  If there's any truth to the surmise that Paul Stevens is based on the real life Robert Oppenheimer, then a lot of the less than savory aspects of the real life scientist is a major the explanation for why it might be difficult for modern viewers to get behind him as a hero.  That's because it's a category that just never really applied to his true life Inspiration.  Oppenheimer can be considered as something of a troubled soul, in the last resort.  A complex tangle of neurotic egoism mixed in with genuine scientific talent.  It's what allowed his mind the ability to understand and harness the very elements of nature itself.  It was also this same mind that first lead him to try and poison one of his college teachers when he was a grad student, and then later in a sense carry out that threat on a mass scale when he found out it was possible to make the very atmosphere of an entire city tear itself apart in a wall of flame.  If Brickman's statement that he based the characters around the actual personalities of the A-Bomb Tests, and the character of Paul can be spoken of as the film's stand-in for Oppenheimer, then is it any wonder that the main lead just doesn't work as a John Hughes hero?  The real scientist is a fascinating study topic.

It makes sense that you could build an entire movie around him, even in a symbolic, non-literal fashion.  What seems to have escaped Brickman's mind is that there's just no way to make this fellow into anything like a clear-cut good guy.  He belongs more in the train of Martin Scorsese's Lonely Existentialists, rather than any straightforward figure that you can root for.  This leads me to the second reservation I have with this movie.  By taking Oppenheimer and transfiguring him into a high school teen, Brickman has done something that makes his film particularly problematic by today's standards.  To be fair, it's not really his fault, in the strictest sense.  This film was made in an era before the Columbine Massacre, or Sandy Hook, and it shows.  It doesn't take seriously the idea that there are still growing minds out there that have already become too troubled and troubling to be considered as anything like a normal, healthy protagonist in a film like this.  It would be like trying to focus on Charlie Manson's high school years, and treating it all as a comedy.  It's not just bad taste, it's also tone deaf on a level that no one at the time was ever aware of while the film was being made.  I wonder if John Lithgow is half as proud of it as he might be today, in light of the events of recent U.S. history.

In the final analysis, this is yet another movie that falls into the rare yet phenomenon of well-made films that are nonetheless too problematic for me to give them a recommendation.  I've run across at least one other specimen in my time as a critic.  The first was a Found Footage style political thriller about an attempt to fake the actual Apollo 11 Moon Landing.  I came away from that flick knowing I'd just seen something well made.  At the same time, I knew we are still living in a time and place where works like this can act as an accelerant for all the worst forms of anti-social behavior that have plagued our society for the last few years.  In volatile times such as these, the last thing any self-respecting critic can afford is to add paranoia fuel to an already blazing fire.  The first film of this nature that I've ever seen would do so by playing into some of most insidious conspiracy theories out there.  Ones which go from mere disbelief in the historical record, and can then branch out from there into even worse territory.  It's easy to see how Brickman's misguided efforts here could do the same thing under the right circumstances.  It's for this reason that I cannot recommend The Manhattan Project as suitable viewing materiel.  It's a film with considerable talent behind and in front of the camera, yet it also marks out a place for itself on that rare list of art works that run the risk of playing too much with fire for its own good.  In doing so, it raises the danger of trigging precisely those types of minds that could cause all sorts of damage.  It's because of this threat that I'm forced to consign films like this to pile of mistaken cinematic efforts.  There may be plenty of funny Brat Pack style thrillers waiting out there.  This film isn't one of them.