Review: 'Adventures Of A Mathematician' Dry as the New Mexico Desert

Writer-director Thor Klein adapts the memoirs of Polish-born statistician Stanislaw Ulam, bringing "Adventures of a Mathematician" to the screen. Unfortunately, whatever juice might have been on the page evaporates en route, leaving this film a pretty dry and dramatically unengaging exercise.

That's a strange outcome, given that Ulam (Philippe Tlokinski) and his younger brother Adam (Mateusz Wieclawek) came to America before the Nazis invaded Poland and brought their systematic slaughter of the Jews to that nation. The film's early scenes show Ulam – a professor at Harvard – trying anxiously to get through to his sister by telephone in order to repeat his advice that she get herself and their parents out of Europe. Later on, after Ulam has accepted an invitation from his friend and fellow mathematician, the Hungarian-born John von Neumann (Fabian Kociecki) to work on developing the atomic bomb in Los Alamos, New Mexico, Ulam clashes with project leader Edward Teller (Joel Basman), who already envisions a hydrogen bomb, despite seemingly insurmountable technical problems. Once the first atomic bomb has been detonated –�with the Trinity test, on July 16, 1945 – Ulam is tormented by ethical qualms. "Do we want to live the rest of our lives with a gun to our heads?" he cries out, anticipating the decades of MAD ("Mutual Assured Destruction") that were a hallmark of the Cold War.

Despite such compelling passages, the film fails to get under the surface and find any real heat; instead of terror or pity, the viewer has to resist the urge to check his watch. Scenes lead into other scenes, with little sense of flow or build, and when Ulam collapses thanks to a bout in brain inflammation –�which left him temporarily unable to perform his work as a mathematician – the medical crisis precipitates little more than a few moments of crabbiness as Ulam recuperates at a seaside locale.

It's possible to find drama in the complex science behind nuclear weapons, especially when the setting is Los Alamos during World War II –�Roland Joffé managed it adequately enough with his 1989 film "Fat Man and Little Boy." Even on stage there have been works that delve into the contrasts and parallels between the rigid equations and the human response of existential terror that the dawn of the nuclear age represented: Michael Frayn's 1998 play "Copenhagen" explores personal tensions and scientific synergy between Niels Borh and Werner Heisenberg, two grandfathers not only of the atomic age but also of quantum physics; then there's Tom Morton Smith's 2015 play "Oppenheimer," centering, like "Fat Man and Little Boy" does, on the physicist who gets the lion's share of the credit (or blame) for the worlds' first atomic weapons); and there's even a musical, 2014's "Atomic," with book and lyrics by Danny Ginges and Gregory Bonsignore and music and lyrics by Philip Foxman. (That play was, perhaps unsurprisingly, something of... ahem... a bomb.)

"Adventures of a Mathematician," alas, has none of the spark of "Copenhagen," none of the flare of "Fat Man and Little Boy," and isn't even an interesting failure. Its inert quality carries over to its unexciting design work, rote editing, and bland cinematography; this film is clearly on a budget, and it's trying to create a sense of time and place despite that, but it's hampered by a leaden lack of energy. Even the climatic confrontation between Ulam and his brother Adam (for reasons that were supposed to constitute a through line for the film) leaves you stifling a yawn.

The film did manage one trick of note: It's so boring I forgot I'd seen it by the next day, until my calendar reminded me to write this review. Take that for what its worth; your megatonnage may vary.

"Adventures of a Mathematician" opens in select theaters and VOD platforms Oct. 1.