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| Paramount Pictures | Release Date: October 20, 1989 |
Starring:
Bonnie Bedelia, Dwight Schultz, John C. McGinley, John Cusack, Laura Dern, Michael Brockman, Natasha Richardson, Paul Newman, Ron Frazier, Ron Vawter
Summary:
This film reenacts the Manhattan Project, the secret wartime project in New Mexico where the first atomic bombs were designed and built.
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Although the film ends with a facile, romantic comment by Oppenheimer, the unnerving momentum of all that has gone before will remain to haunt the imagination of the viewers. [20 Oct 1989, p.D2]
Thanks to a disproportionately superior second hour, Fat Man and Little Boy improves on its historically valid, but commercially suicidal, title. It is not, however, even the screen's second best chronicle of atomic bomb development in wartime Los Alamos, N.M. [20 Oct 1989, p.4D]
Joffe is much more interested in issues than people, and the personal exchanges in his new film are almost completely unilluminating and uninvolving - they take the form of speeches, and they're blunt, histrionic and passionless. [20 Oct 1989, p.A]
Newman has no trouble bringing the tough-talking ‘can do’ general to life. The trouble is the scriptwriters have no interest in exploring the man behind the mission. This tends to tilt the dramatic balance toward Oppenheimer. The film falls short here, too, partially because of Schultz’ lackluster performance, but primarily because the script fails to give a clue to what made this man tick.
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The director, Roland Joffe, and his co-screenwriter, Bruce Robinson, took this inherently dramatic subject and got lost in it; the script is a shambles.
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