http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/RealGenius

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Real Genius is a comedy/science fiction film produced in 1985, starring Val Kilmer, Gabriel Jarret, Michelle Meyrink, and William Atherton.

The movie starts out about Mitch Taylor, a 15 year old boy who designs a cutting edge laser for his high school science fair. This gains him the attention of professor and educational TV show (think Cosmos: A Personal Voyage with Carl Sagan) host Jerry Hathaway, who offers to enter the wunderkind at Pacific Tech as an accelerated student. There, Mitch takes classes taught by tape recorder and meets the irreverent Chris Knight; who tries to teach the younger Mitch that he can't take everything in life so seriously, particularly when Mitch ends up as the Butt-Monkey of the school's Jerkass, Kent.

As it turns out, Chris and Kent are competing for the same post-graduate position under Hathaway, and while Chris's lighthearted quasi-slacker attitude rankles the professor, Kent shamelessly toadies up and finally seems to triumph over the heroes when he sabotages Chris and Mitch's laser project work.

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The final straw comes when Chris and Mitch discover that Hathaway has secretly contracted with the CIA to turn their laser into a weapon and take all the credit. Chris doesn't approve, and recruits the genius kids of the university to help him take revenge on both the greedy Hathaway and Kent during the laser's first live-fire exercise.

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