Fat Man and Little Boy

What Fat Man and Little Boy tells us is potent and essential. It tells us if history is dominated by individual action, then individual action has meaning -- in history everything is for keeps. Read full review

Joffe may remain as variable a filmmaker as ever, but this time, at least, he gives one something really solid to think about. Read full review

Joffe does a good job of making a complex project comprehensible to a mass audience with no memory of World War II. Moreover, he infuses drama into an often cerebral project by highlighting the tensions among the characters. [20 Oct 1989, p.E13]

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]

Whatever his film's contrivances as it builds, with this closing, Joffe has made a permanent contribution to our national insomnia. [20 Oct 1989, p.F1]

It's a handsome period piece and a decent character drama, and it has that Newman performance. But it never has enough bang for the buck, and that's too bad. [20 Oct 1989, p.G11]

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]

Fat Man and Little Boy tries to cover too much territory by introducing corny romantic subplots involving Oppenheimer's mistress and a relationship between a young scientist (John Cusack) and a nurse (Laura Dern). These awkwardly written sequences remind us that we are watching a conventional movie and destroy any documentarylike reality. [20 Oct 1989, p.A]

It is a slick, well-made film, graced by the stirring performance of Paul Newman, but it offers little that is new about that crucial chapter in the world's history. [30 Oct 1989]

Certainly worth seeing for its care, authenticity and the central performances, but the suggestions of collective guilt and responsibility, and the pushing of humanity towards the brink are just too coy to ever be really effective. Read full review

Newman is terse and quietly assured as Groves. He gives Fat Man and Little Boy its rigid backbone, its sense of purpose. Regrettably, he spends a fair amount of time off screen and away from Los Alamos. [20 Oct 1989, p.6]

There is scarcely a performance in Fat Man and Little Boy that is less than commendable. Almost every scene is thoughtfully and tastefully (though not imaginatively) devised. But the characters and shots do not work together to tell a story. Instead, we get a bunch of inconclusive vignettes. Read full review

Fat Man seems unsure of which human story to concentrate on. Read full review

On one level, the film compels through force of intellect, but ultimately it lacks the cohesive emotional force, the ferocity, to consistently nurture its conviction over two hours. Read full review

Visually, Fat Man and Little Boy is almost obscenely beautiful. But while Joffe's eye is magnificent, his dramatic instincts are flaccid. [20 Oct 1989, p.79p]

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]

When a film is based on history, especially a moment in history that almost everyone knows, a built-in major problem is that there is no tension for the climactic scenes. To make it successful, the writer and director must find other places to insert drama, to create tension, to give viewers the unexpected. Maybe Roland Joffe forgot. [24 Oct 1989, p.3D]

Fat Man and Little Boy casts a wide net, but it never really traps its subject. The screenplay simply isn't up to the job. Only in the last half hour, as Trinity approaches, does dramatic fission occur. [30 Oct 1989, p.75]

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. Read full review

Despite the considerable creative and technical talents of those involved, Fat Man And Little Boy is slow, stilted, and stultifying. Read full review

The movie labors under an enormous handicap: A much better, more intelligent and more exciting film has already been made about this same subject. Read full review

Fat Man and Little Boy is so confused, so stunningly ineffective, that General Groves's hawkish statements are more persuasive than the dove-ish apprehensions expressed by the scientists. Even the sight of a scientist dying horribly of radiation poisoning fails to be moving. Read full review

Honorable, instructive, courageous: Fat Man and Little Boy, the true story of the creation of the atomic bomb in Los Alamos, N.M., is admirable in every respect save one - it's a lousy movie. [20 Oct 1989]

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.