For some stupid reason I stayed up very late last night, watching a very bad movie. I should have pulled the plug on it thirty minutes in, but considering Paul Newman was the star I just had to see it through. Besides, I knew one thing had to happen...there had to be a big explosion at the end and that would make it worth the while, right? Fat Man and Little Boy has to be one of the most scattered and boring historical epics ever committed to celluloid. Not only does the story consistently jump from one unsatisfying sub-plot to another, it can't seem to make up its mind whether it's multiple love stories or simply a story about the men who built the first atomic bomb. So much time is spent on tangents that have little to do with the actual project that the mammoth project itself is tossed in the back seat in favor of the over-wrenched melodrama. Fat Man and Little Boy's flaws are plenty, but the fatal flaw of allowing itself to lose the plot not only distorts the premise of the film, it renders it completely dull.
And the big payoff at the end? More like a fart in the bathtub. Director Roland Joffé mysteriously opts for a throwaway moment where the camera is locked on the face of Oppenheimer instead of showing us the majestic but deadly spectacle that both made this man and destroyed him. Oh sure, this movie is all about Oppy, but Dwight Schultz's over-the-top, chain smoking Oppy was grating, pretentious and impossible to care for. There are plenty of bad performances in this film and even Newman himself becomes predictable as the tough-as-nails General pushing the brain trust from the sidelines.My final grievance with this movie is perhaps the most perplexing of all. In a film about the dark side of science where the evil that men do culminates in building the most horrific of all our scientific feats, you would assume a story of this magnitude would be told with a completely straight and respectful face. Wrong. For some strange reason, the tone Joffé employs throughout FMaLB is light and peppered with pseudo-comic moments and anecdotes. Making light out of the creation of a device that horrifically murdered over 200,000 Japanese civilians is not something to be scoffed at. Not only do these lives lost deserve a lot more respect, the guilt and anguish the men responsible the bomb must have experienced should have been given a far more sobering inspection.
Here's a list of other recent screenings:
George Tillman Jr.'s Notorious (5)
Elia Kazan's Panic in the Streets (9)
Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly (8)
BBC's Saxondale - Season 1 (7)
Korgoth of Barbaria - Pilot (8)
Nick Castle's The Last Starfighter (5)
Steven Lisberger's Tron (7)
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