Assigned to oversee the development of the atomic bomb, Gen. Leslie Groves is a stern military man determined to have the project go according to plan. Groves selects J. Robert Oppenheimer as the key scientist on the top-secret operation, but the two men clash fiercely on a number of issues. Despite their frequent conflicts, Groves and Oppenheimer ultimately push ahead with two bomb designs — the bigger "Fat Man" and the more streamlined "Little Boy."
Fat Man and Little Boy is a fiction based on the Manhattan Project, but it is thin and unfocused and hardly even suggests the enormous moral and practical questions that the scientists wrestled with in the New Mexico desert.
– Roger Ebert,
Chicago Sun-Times,
1 Jan 2000
rotten:
[Fat Man] is not resoundingly disastrous. That would imply a certain energy.