Directed by Marshall Brickman, who co-wrote with Thomas Baum, and released theatrically by MGM in 1986, The Manhattan Project mixes up eighties era teen hijinks with Reagan-era politics in some pretty entertaining ways. The film is clearly a product of its time, but it holds up well despite some dated aspects of the production.

The central plot revolves around Paul Stevens (Christopher Collet), a high school student who is much smarter than his peers, but who tends to use his smarts to cause trouble rather than to excel in school. The reality is that Paul doesn't want to become looked at as a nerd by his classmates, even though he is very bright. Paul's involved with Jenny (Cynthia Nixon), a pretty girl almost as clever as he. Their lives change when Paul's mom, Elizabeth Stephens (Jill Eikenberry) starts dating a new arrival in town in the form of Doctor John Mathewson (John Lithgow).

See, John is a nuclear scientist and when Paul is given a tour of John's lab, well, the kid is savvy enough to pick up on one very particular detail: the lab is dealing with weapons grade plutonium and therefore very likely involved in the manufacturing of nuclear weapons. Sure, they may tell everyone in town that this is all very safe and that they're not working on weapons of mass destruction, but Paul knows they're lying. Jenny, a journalist-in-training, figure she can write up a piece to get the word out and maybe put a stop to this before something goes wrong, but Paul is pretty sure that no one will take a high school reporter seriously on a matter like this. So what does he do to draw attention to the matter? He launches a plan to steal some of that plutonium and build his own atomic bomb. Of course, as they set out to do this, they inevitably wind up catching the attention of certain parties… nothing can be easy, right?

Fans of War Games and other eighties era ‘smart kids vs. adults' movies that seemed to be popular for a while in that decade will no doubt appreciate The Manhattan Project but this one is a bit darker and occasionally more intense than that picture or entertaining fodder like Real Geniuses. The film deals with some pretty dark themes and, with the exception of the unusually hokey heist sequence, it plays things pretty much entirely straight from start to finish. There is humor here to be sure, but it comes naturally from the dialogue and relationships between the different characters. It doesn't feel forced like it does in similar pictures and it only rarely takes you out of the movie. The end result is a film that, as unlikely as it might be, never feels so preposterous that you wind up feeling like it could never happen in real life, particularly in this day and age where the media report on terrorists and their attempts to acquire dirty bombs on a fairly regular basis.

The performances go a long way towards making this work as well as it does. John Lithgow is best known these days to a lot of people for his work on 3rd Rock From The Sun but here, in a role he took long before he played that part, he's… not quite sinister but at the very least kind of shifty. He's not only tough to trust, at least from the point of view of our main character, but also potentially dangerous to his mother. Jill Eikenberry plays said mother with a hint of naivety but it works, she's good in the part and likeable enough. Cynthia Nixon is well cast as Paul's girlfriend. She's more than just a pretty face to hang off of the hero, she is in many ways his equal and his ‘partner in crime. Christopher Collet does stand out work here too. He and Nixon have an affable chemistry that makes them fun to watch and easy to cheer for even if what they're doing is pretty far gone and out.

The stand out scenes, however, are the ones where Collet and Lithgow share the screen. It's here that we realize that they in many ways have a lot in common. Collet's character could easily grow up to be someone like Mathewson were he to turn down a different path in life. The parallels that the movie draws between are quite interesting and well thought out. The similarities that they share makes the otherwise somewhat predictable finale a bit more enjoyable and clever than it would have been otherwise. This one holds up well.

Video:

The Manhattan Project arrives on Blu-ray from Kino framed at 1.85.1 widescreen in AVC encoded 1080p high definition and for the most part it looks really good. Colors are bright and bold and even garish by modern standards but never coming across as artificially boosted or off. Skin tones look nice and lifelike, quite accurate, while black levels are pretty solid. We get a very nice level of detail evident throughout as well as frequently impressive texture and depth. There's very little print damage outside of a small white speck here and there and the disc is free of any obvious compression, edge enhancement and noise reduction.