The plot synopsis didn't help-It's not warmhearted. We watch the journey of a man from the beginning scenes as a creative teacher, loving brother and son who grows increasingly anxious as the Nazis move toward Lviv, his parents' home and the location of his college and friends. He is temporarily safe (no resident status) in the US with his 17 year old brother but feels he needs to do more for the war effort, and joins the Los Alamos nuclear team, bringing his wife, a French/Jewish refugee in danger of being sent back to wartime France (he is attracted to her, but also wants her safe from Nazis). The nuclear team finds the nuclear solution they sought, the war is won and the bomb is used on civilians, but Ulam has lost his family and college friends in Poland. (Later, he will lose his longtime team member and friend von Neumann to cancer, probably caused by atomic radiation at the bomb test site). Ulam is left in a dream state, meditating on earlier lost Native American civilizations like the Anansazi with the ghost of his friend...The non-movie Ulam probably felt the survivor guilt that his colleague Leo Szilard felt (My Trial as a War Criminal) but his family life continued and he formed new creative computer math teams. This biopic sort of presupposes familiarity with WWII and Cold War issues like US impunity from war crimes...

Back when I was a chemistry and math student in university, this was the type of movie I dreamed of one day making. A movie which has to balance the science, history and the biography part of a biopic - which often feels like a no-win balance. Enough science to make it interesting for its target audience but not too much to alienate everyone else. Enough of a human story expected from a biopic but not too much to make it boring. Personally, I thought the balance was right. There's some real math and science in the story, the history is absolutely fascinating, the American family elements don't add much to the story, but a necessary element of a traditional biopic.

The other user reviews are complaining about the "adventures" part of the title, as if they're expecting an action movie or something. But the title just comes from a part of the dialogue when they make the big decision to move to Los Alamos, "Are you ready for an adventure?" Immigrants moving across the country, leaving their "cushy" academia job for the Manhattan Project. That is an adventure to them.

There are a lot of big names and interesting aspects to the Manhattan project, and a lot of interesting and different stories that could have been told, but this one is personal to the filmmakers. The Polish identity is a running theme here. It's an ode to Stanislaw Ulam and should not be viewed as a history of the Manhattan Project (which it is not, it's just one small aspect of it that Ulam was involved in) and is very much a traditional independent biopic.

There are no adventures in this film. It covers about 10 years of this person's life. The pace of the movie is excruciatingly slow. The mathematician contributes a couple of ideas to the Manhattan Project. That's about all that happens. Most of the film is scenes of him brooding and scowling.