Fat Man and Little Boy (1989) on Netflix
PG-1319892h 7mBiographyDramaHistory
Colonel Leslie Groves takes charge of the Manhattan Project, the secret wartime effort to build an atomic bomb. He picks physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer to lead the team, and the two clash.
- Netflix2.9/5
- IMDb6.5/109,924 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes50%
Trailer
Plot summary
In September 1942, Colonel Leslie Groves is assigned to head the Manhattan Project, the secret Allied effort to build the first nuclear weapons before the Germans can. He chooses J. Robert Oppenheimer, a University of California, Berkeley physicist, to lead the project's team. Oppenheimer knows northern New Mexico from boyhood and picks a remote mesa beside Los Alamos Canyon, northwest of Santa Fe, for the research facility. Groves, a military man, and Oppenheimer, a scientist, clash often over how the work should go, and Oppenheimer also argues with colleagues who debate whether their consciences belong in the project. Nurse Kathleen Robinson and physicist Michael Merriman question what they are taking part in.
Cast
- Michael Brockmanas William 'Deke' Parsons
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Fat Man and Little Boy (1989)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Co-writer Bruce Robinson called the screenplay "the best thing I've ever written," but said director Roland Joffé ruined it, saying "The script was fucked up horribly by Roland."
- The Los Alamos research facility was re-created for the film mainly outside Durango, Mexico in the fall of 1988, with 35 buildings constructed at a cost of over $2 million.
SPOILER
John Cusack's physicist Michael Merriman is a fictional composite invented as the film's moral compass, partly based on Louis Slotin, whose real radiation accident and death came only after the bombs were dropped on Japan.- The real J. Robert Oppenheimer was already under FBI surveillance for suspected Communist views before he was chosen to lead the Manhattan Project; once picked, every phone call was recorded and every contact noted.
