In The Scene Where He Steals the Plutonium
Why did he have to cut through the wall and put it on a remote control car? Why didn't he just throw it into his bag?
so many plot holes!
I don't really have an answer, just want to say how much i hated it. I finally watched this dumb flick after 18 years of avoiding it. I should have continued my "consecutive years of avoidance". What an idiot that kid was. And how stupid am I for watching it?? I knew this was anti-nuke, (yes the world would be better w/o them) but this film has our (USA) military as the bad guys, not the a-hole kid who thinks he can build a bomb and not face any consequences because he's "a kid"... thanks for reading, rant off....
shareI think he drove it away because if case it spilled in his bag.
;~
I want your blood...
Oh be quiet.
The feds have been painted as the bad guys on numerous occasions ("X Files", "Roswell"). It's that whole "G-Men" are after you. Don't sweat it. This movie isn't saying the military is evil.
Remember when it was made also - 1986. Everyone was afraid Russia or the US was gonna accidentally blow up the world by pressing a button. People were living in fear of it. Two young kids being afraid of getting nuked and trying to do something about it. I'm no politician and really don't have a say in the matter, but I think it was a refreshing movie for back then, and still like it today. Probably more for the fact that it reminds me of when I was younger than for the subject matter. And as for the remote control car? Maybe he thought he might get caught on the way out and could come back and get it later.
shareI second this answer... to those who were born on or after about 1980, you may not have any childhood memories of the fears of global thermonuclear holocaust (which were quite justified during the Cold War).
To those of us a bit older, however, we clearly understood the world situation when this film came out - this being just a couple short years after "The Day After" was released after all.
The whole concept of a government base disguised to look like a medical supply company lab is a very plausible cover, and it's possible something very similar to this has been done for some of the various black budget "ancillary" programs at some time in the past. If they go "off budget" they also go off the radar of the various regulatory agencies who might otherwise prevent them from taking on such a "public disguise".
The film's protagonist was making a very valid point with his work... at first the goal was to steal a sample of the material and publish an article, to let the world know what was hiding in the suburbs - but then he realized it could be a world changing event (that would make people reflect on "current" ideals and hopefully back away from the precipice of holocaust that they were so close to the edge to so many times) if he was able to actually make a working device.
Although the amount of milling machinery he had in his project room was laughably low, many of the other details about his triggering device and the overall design seemed semi plausible. I don't see how one could make the pit as he did however - normally they're hollow to allow momemtum to build up during the early stages of implosion before the critical mass is reached... the device from the film seemed as if he just filled the cavity with the Pu flakes and used an induction heater (?) to melt them into a solid block. Not sure how that's gonna yield a perfectly spherical pit, even if you have the exact amount of Pu required. Modern weapon designs don't necessarily use a sphere anymore (engineering and computational simulations have advanced a _lot_ since the Manhattan Project, so they make the bomb fit into the case better with egg shapes, etc) but for an "easy" design, the sphere seems the way to go.
As for the RC car, there's been several good answers given... either to avoid radiation detectors, to allow a second chance if he was spotted, to lower radiation exposure, etc.
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