One of the things I noticed with the experiments I participated in was that while the drama was very real for me, to an outside observer, its actually kind of dull. To keep the pacing tight and keep the audience interested, they have to spice it up a bit.
As I understand it, Slotin was demonstrating to another colleague how to test the distance dependence of criticality, so the data collected was less valuable to the demonstration than the procedure. I think the creative license here was the second screw driver to make it look more sciencey. Holding one half of the beryllium sphere with a bare hand (as was part of the approved procedure) probably felt a little too slap-dash, and the fact that Slotin's procedure involving a screw-driver was unapproved in the first place undermines the role of the scene to call out the government's lack of care for Cusack's American-everyman character. If there's a (tenuous) moral to be extracted from the incident, its that Slotin apparently believed in the cowboy persona he projected, and it cost him his life.
I want to be very clear here that I don't actually think there's much moral to this story. They had an idea of how bad criticality could be, but there was no real deterrent other than Fermi telling Slotin and others that if they kept up the procedure, they'd be "dead within a year". That tells me that everybody, from Oppenheimer on down, did not understand just how dangerous this sort of demonstration could be. Given the era, that's pretty understandable.
As I understand it, Slotin was demonstrating to another colleague how to test the distance dependence of criticality, so the data collected was less valuable to the demonstration than the procedure. I think the creative license here was the second screw driver to make it look more sciencey. Holding one half of the beryllium sphere with a bare hand (as was part of the approved procedure) probably felt a little too slap-dash, and the fact that Slotin's procedure involving a screw-driver was unapproved in the first place undermines the role of the scene to call out the government's lack of care for Cusack's American-everyman character. If there's a (tenuous) moral to be extracted from the incident, its that Slotin apparently believed in the cowboy persona he projected, and it cost him his life.