The Manhattan Project (1986) on Netflix
Gifted student Paul Stephens grows suspicious of a laboratory in Ithaca, New York, that hides a nuclear weapons program. He and his girlfriend, Jenny Anderman, plan to steal plutonium from it.
- Netflix3.5/5
- IMDb6.1/107,595 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes50%
Trailer
Plot summary
Dr. John Mathewson works out a process that refines plutonium to a purity above 99.997 percent, and the government gives him a laboratory in Ithaca, New York, disguised as a medical company. While apartment hunting, he meets real estate agent Elizabeth Stephens, a single mother, and invites her teenage son Paul to see the lab. Paul is an unusually gifted science student, and an improbable five-leaf clover patch in the grass makes him doubt the company's story. He and his girlfriend, Jenny Anderman, an aspiring journalist, plan to take plutonium from the lab and expose the place. Paul argues that the plutonium by itself proves little, and says he can build his own nuclear device and enter it in a science fair.
Cast
- Abraham Ungeras Roland (as Abe Unger)
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Manhattan Project (1986)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- For the film's science fair scenes, the producers staged an actual science fair at New York's Penta Hotel and paid real tri-state-area students $75 each to bring their own original science projects.
- The premise was likely inspired by the real case of John Aristotle Phillips, a Princeton undergraduate nicknamed the 'A-Bomb Kid' after he designed a nuclear weapon for a 1977 term paper using only publicly available books and articles.
- Bran Ferren used literally tons of technical gear purchased surplus from Los Alamos National Laboratory, and performed most of the film's visual effects work, including the robotics, live on set.
- The Manhattan Project was a box-office bomb, with ticket sales recovering only 21 percent of its budget, and it was the first release from the short-lived Gladden Entertainment.
- Some observers blamed the film's poor box office on the Chernobyl nuclear disaster happening around its release, though director Marshall Brickman brushed this off, recalling people telling him 'God, what great timing' as if he'd had foresight.
- Thorn-EMI Screen Entertainment provided the $13 million it actually cost to make the film, while the rest of the budget went as consultancy fees to Gladden Entertainment's controversial founder and chairman, David Begelman.
- Marshall Brickman decided against doing something historical, saying: "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."
