I'd go see the Feynman movie. I bet the "is he fundamentally a good guy or a bad guy" angle would be catnip for a lot of filmmakers.
There was a 1996 movie starring Matthew Broderick as Feynman ("Infinity"), but my recollection is that it only covered his life up to the point where his wife tragically passed away from tuberculosis, which was during the Manhattan Project, so he was still fairly young at that point. It's been years since I saw it, though. Looks like it's streaming (...with ads) in several places, maybe I'll watch it again.
The fundamental problem with Feynman is that, other than the death of his first wife, he just doesn't really have anything all that dark and dramatic in his life to serve as a dramatic hook. He was at Los Alamos, but played a relatively minor role, and doesn't seem to have been especially tortured about his participation in the making of the bomb. His professional dark night of the soul came right after the war at Cornell, but he got unblocked for a charmingly nerdy reason (the spinning plate story), and then made his revolutionary contributions to physics. And then for the most part, he just sort of noodled around happily at Caltech for the next decade or two. There's a bit of drama at the very end with the Challenger thing, but that's about it.
It's a very colorful and eventful life, but it's not dramatic in the way that would make it good fodder for a prestige film. He was successful relatively early on, got to a place where he was happy, and pretty much stayed happy. And they just don't make or celebrate movies about people who were basically happy and successful.
I'd go see the Feynman movie. I bet the "is he fundamentally a good guy or a bad guy" angle would be catnip for a lot of filmmakers.
There was a 1996 movie starring Matthew Broderick as Feynman ("Infinity"), but my recollection is that it only covered his life up to the point where his wife tragically passed away from tuberculosis, which was during the Manhattan Project, so he was still fairly young at that point. It's been years since I saw it, though. Looks like it's streaming (...with ads) in several places, maybe I'll watch it again.
The fundamental problem with Feynman is that, other than the death of his first wife, he just doesn't really have anything all that dark and dramatic in his life to serve as a dramatic hook. He was at Los Alamos, but played a relatively minor role, and doesn't seem to have been especially tortured about his participation in the making of the bomb. His professional dark night of the soul came right after the war at Cornell, but he got unblocked for a charmingly nerdy reason (the spinning plate story), and then made his revolutionary contributions to physics. And then for the most part, he just sort of noodled around happily at Caltech for the next decade or two. There's a bit of drama at the very end with the Challenger thing, but that's about it.
It's a very colorful and eventful life, but it's not dramatic in the way that would make it good fodder for a prestige film. He was successful relatively early on, got to a place where he was happy, and pretty much stayed happy. And they just don't make or celebrate movies about people who were basically happy and successful.