This is not, however, another one of those teenage movies about bright kids and science projects. There have been some good movies in that genre - I liked "WarGames" and "Real Genius" - but this isn't really a teenage movie at all, it's a thriller. And it's one of those thrillers that stays as close as possible to the everyday lives of convincing people, so that the movie's frightening aspects are convincing.
The kid is played by Christopher Collet. He is very, very smart.
We know that not just because we are told so, but because the movie has lots of subtle, sometimes funny little ways of demonstrating it - as when the kid solves a puzzle in three seconds flat, just as we were trying to understand it.
The kid lives with his mother (Jill Eikenberry) in an upstate New York college town. John Lithgow plays the scientist who moves into the town and starts to date Eikenberry and makes friends with the kid. The movie is very sophisticated about the relationship between Collet and Lithgow. This isn't a case of the two men competing for the affections of the mother; indeed, there are times when these two bright, lonely males seem to have more in common with each other.
In particular, the Lithgow character isn't allowed to fall into cliches. He isn't a mad scientist, and he isn't a heartless intellectual: He's just a smart man trying to do his job well and still have some measure of simple human pleasure.
After Collet is given his tour of the "research center," he tells his girlfriend (Cynthia Nixon) that he's a little insulted that they thought they could fool him. He knows a bomb factory when he sees one.
And so, to prove various things to various people, the kid figures out a way to sneak into the plant, steal some plutonium and build his own nuclear bomb. He wants to enter it in a New York City science fair.
I love it when movies get very detailed about clever schemes for outsmarting people. "The Manhattan Project" invites us to figure out things along with Collet, as he uses his girlfriend as a decoy and outsmarts the security guards at the plant. Inside, he has it all figured out: how to baffle the automatic alarms, how to anticipate what the guards are going to do, how to get in and out without being detected.
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