Day One
December 2007 Reviewed by: Mischa Hayek Format: DVD	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

Joseph Sargent’s Emmy Award-winning Day One tells the story of the Manhattan Project -- the WWII initiative to build the first atomic bomb -- from its conception to the actual dropping of the two bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The story begins in Germany in 1933 with the escape of Jewish physicist Leo Szilard (Michael Tucker) to England and subsequent relocation to the United States. Szilard believes that it is possible to split the atom and use the energy to construct a massive bomb and that America had better construct one soon because Hitler and the Nazis will surely do so. Convincing Albert Einstein (Peter Boretski) that the German physicists are working on building a bomb, Einstein signs a letter to President Roosevelt (David Ogden Stiers) advising FDR that America should begin designing and constructing an atomic bomb.

Taking his advice, FDR commissions a committee, and the day-to-day management of the newly named Manhattan Project falls to Colonel Leslie Groves (Brian Dennehy), an Army engineering expert. Seeking assistance from world-renowned physicists at the University of Chicago and University of California at Berkeley, including Enrico Fermi (Tony Shaloub), Arthur Compton (John McMartin ), and J. Robert Oppenheimer (David Strathairn), Groves (now a general) creates the team of scientists and engineers who develop the world’s first atomic bombs.

The Manhattan Project is a fascinating story. Unfortunately, Day One is not really a well-made movie. I suspect that its Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama in 1989 was captured because of the seriousness of the subject matter and the earnest acting by Dennehy, Strathairn, and Tucker. Written by David Rintels (who also produced it) and based on Peter Wyden’s book, Day One: Before Hiroshima and After, Rintel’s story fails to explain in layman’s terms how the atomic bomb is constructed and what the various teams are working on. (Even I couldn’t follow what the various teams were doing, and I studied physics for three years at university!) There are many holes in the story. We see that many scientists are stressed, many timelines are tight, and many politicians, bureaucrats, and scientists are bickering. No news there.

The one point that I will remember from Day One is that it seemed pretty clear that many in the military and in Washington were intent on using the two atomic bombs regardless of whether Japan was about to surrender. The popular justification for dropping the bombs -- that thousands were killed to save millions -- doesn’t seem to hold water according to the film.

Now picture and sound quality: The only good thing I can say about the images is that at least the colors are reasonably accurate. Everything else looks awful, with poor definition, severe digital artifacts, and such degradation that it looks like the source was a cable-TV feed. It’s the poorest image I’ve ever seen from a DVD. The sound quality is on par with the picture -- terrible. Dialogue is difficult to hear, and distortion is evident. As with the picture, I can only surmise that a low-resolution, severely degraded source was used for the transfer. To its credit, Acorn Media acknowledges the poor DVD presentation with a disclaimer at the bottom of the back cover, admitting that there are flaws that could not be corrected from the source materials.

The DVD bonus features are equally abysmal -- just a list of the major actors’ film biographies. It is better to go to the Internet Movie Database for this information.

• Go Back