Nice effects though.

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

It's 1943, 766 days before Hiroshima. Charlie Isaacs with his wife Abby and young son arrive at the secret Los Alamos research base tasked with creating the atomic bomb, the Manhattan Project. Reed Akley is the chief designer under Robert Oppenheimer. He hopes that Charlie has the answer to his problem. Dr. Frank Winter leads a small group on an alternative design. The group includes Helen Prins, Paul Crosley, Glen Babbit, Jim Meeks, Fritz Fedowitz, and Sid Liao. Family life is a struggle in the armed camp. Frank's botanist wife Dr. Liza Winter slowly uncovers the secret while daughter Callie is tired of the camp. Through it all, there is the threat of the Nazi program and spies within the camp.This is a fictionalization of the real Manhattan project. I like the first season with the personal ambitions, scientific intrigue, and rivalry. There are situations that seems wrong but it's still very compelling. The second season starts going down a rocky path. It starts with Frank's Kafkaesque imprisonment. It's surreal with an obvious reveal. It also separates Frank from the rest of the show. Without Frank, the rest of the show sputters. By the time he returns, the show has stalled and struggles to recover. The espionage is intriguing but time and time again, the characters do unlikely actions. The show becomes more and more unreal. The final ending stalks the show. I almost wish for the show to create an alternate world history. It is also limited with a definitive expiry date. Two seasons are enough.

What a disappointment. I forced myself through every episode to see if it would improve. The Manhattan Project was apparently created by alcoholism, chain-smoking, affairs, and paranoia. And like 2 scientists.There are good performances and some parts of the story are interesting. But while J. Robert Oppenheimer appears and some well- known scientists are mentioned, where is Enrico Fermi, Mark Oliphant and Edward Teller? Could have had a whole running gag on Richard Feynman's safe-cracking alone!There are many compelling docudramas that are educational and entertaining. This is not one of them.

I think it's already been said, started out promising but soon became tedious and contrived. A little bit like a undergraduate film using paint by numbers dramatic exercises. Simply forgetting the basics, that sub- plots have to be interesting and back up the main plot (which soon became secondary) and at least one of the characters has to be likable so you care what happens to them! I hate the kind of films that are say set in space and are about a serial killer, why bother? don't set a film in space if doesn't add anything to the story about a serial killer, likewise don't make a series about the most important event in human history and make it incidental to the story! a real shame as it had moments but no heart at all.

There is one good thing about Manhattan--the acting of John Benjamin Hickey. They aren't even trying to be historically accurate. Once I realized that, I tried to watch it as though it were a fairy tale, but I still found myself getting angry in almost every episode. No folks, in the 1940s, they didn't have pink plastic curlers; they didn't know about the theory that an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs; no one connected with the project went home and told family members about it--no one. Oppenheimer wasn't like that. Los Alamos is in pine trees, not pinyon-juniper forest, so where did that huge scorpion come from? The writers didn't care; no one applied any sort of quality control on the facts; and the real story is so much more interesting than this nonsense. I made it through 5 episodes, because I really like Ashley Zukerman's acting in other things, but I give up. Life is too short to be angry. If you want to see a better fictionalized version of the events, try Oppenheimer (1980), with Sam Waterston.