Fat Man & Little Boy

The building blocks and necessary materials are all right there for easy and accessible use to make a far better movie than this over the subject matter. How can a movie about the Manhattan Project turn out this boring? Quite simply, by shifting the focus from actually creating the project into a variety of stories about people involved in the project, none of which are of much interest or depth.

The creation of the atomic bomb is a moral quandary for the ages, much like dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but Fat Man & Little Boy is a shallow exercise in tedium and pedantic pageantry. Not a single person in this script can be considered remotely plausible as a human being, despite being based on real life figures. They’re cardboard cutouts who function as easily digestible types and never move beyond that. There’s no questioning over what they’re doing is right or wrong, no guilt or remorse, no elation, nothing.

Well, that’s not entirely true. There’s the feeling that this was scrapped together from poorly written and researched public school history books that present bite-sized chunks of information for a large group of people. We see the social life, and we get a glimpse of life in the 1940s, but that’s about all we see. A story involving John Cusack and Laura Dern falling in love as he slowly dies of radiation poisoning is of questionable taste. Even more questionable of a choice is showing Cusack’s death bed scene occurring on the same night on the first atomic bomb test. Both events are underscored and neither is given the emotional payoff that they deserved.

Fat Man & Little Boy is that phrase in microcosm: there’s no emotional payoff to any of the events. Paul Newman is straddled with playing a scold; characters aren’t given dialog so much as they’re given long speechifying moments about nothing in particular since there’s no weight or payoff to the events. So I raise the question once more: How could a movie about the Manhattan Project contain such a wealth of material to work with and come up with nothing of consequence?