Slashdot Mirror
Nobel Prize Winners on Sci-Fi Flicks
scientistguy writes "In case you missed it, Harold Varmus, Nobel prize winning retrovirologist and cancer biologist, former NIH director, and current
head of Memorial
Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, has written a review
of 28 Days Later
in this weekend's New
York Times. One would think
that his time is more valuably spent running important medical institutions,
searching for new cancer insights/cures, etc, but the dude's also an English lit major and has a penchant for
sci-fi. 28 Days Later
is the new flick from director Danny Boyle (Shallow
Grave, Trainspotting, etc.) about a virus termed rage
that is advertently released from a Cambridge primate research facility and
goes on to devastate much of merry old England more rapidly than the dragons
did in Reign of Fire. Although Varmus appears to go out of
his way to be even handed, it's clear that he has a problem suspending disbelief on a
topic (virology) that is near and dear to him. Reviews from
professional movie critics on 28 Days
Later have been mixed, but Ebert
and another NY
Times reviewer were into it.
Good, clean summer fun - aside from 'the scenes
of maiming, dismemberment, clubbing, shooting, bayoneting and shoplifting'."
For a mere £15 you can watch it on your region-free DVD player. Eat that, MPAA fascists!
-----SPOILERS-----
Well, from the little that we're told, the chimps are under a drug regimen designed to *repress* the rage. So,
A.) The virus quiets down momentarily when the victim has satisfied the desire to attack (which matches the behavior of the "zombies" in the flick, who slow down and wander off after any confrontation)
or
B.) The chimp seeing the videos was being monitored for threshold levels or some such.
Remember, the researcher said (pretty much) that "we need to see the phenomenon to understand it"
Frankly, what little hope I had of reasonable consistency died when the lights were on in the supermarket.
Science this ain't. After all "all of Manchester" is burning down but London, with more old buildings and the same lack of controls has not a single fire, even WITH their blowing up a gas (sorry, "petrol") station. I was wondering about the lack of fires *way* before they showed the burning skyline.
It's a thrill flick, dude. You're not going to find the logical reason for everything. You'ld be better off trying to find logic in the sequence of stardates in early Star Trek episodes.
Rustin
Data is the lever, rigor the fulcrum, brains the force that drives it all.
Vincent Price's "The Last Man on Earth" released some time in the 60s-70s had virtually the same exact plotline: disease infects all of mankind, and Price is immune. Except the infected aren't zombies. They're vampires. It was a crappy movie, but somewhat affecting. So... can anyone answer this? Was Boyle merely influenced by this classic? Or is it a total rip-off?
So even though, the whole idea of the virus getting transmitted to humans was insane, I didn't care.
You find the idea of a virus being transmitted from other primates to humans insane? Maybe I'm misunderstanding you; if so, I apologise. I haven't seen the movie, but from reading the review this seems like one of its least unrealistic aspects. Cross-species viral infection is quite common, and the primate-human jump has been made by, for example, the ebola virus.
Jurisprudence Fetishist Gets Off On A Technicality --theonion.com
You can't call the CGI in the hulk movie bad without having seen it. They actually pulled it off quite well.
The trailers and commercials certainly DO look bad. They look worse than the worse parts of the movie, IMO. I don't really know why they put crappy shots in the previews, but they did.
Wow. It's a NY Times story, but someone finally figured out you can use the Google affiliate link to skip all the free reg hoo-haw. I think that's a first. Been waiting for that ever since the account generator stopped working.
Please keep it up!
(When it came out in Belgium).
Bloody great movie, mate, a remake of John Wyndham's Day of the Triffids only wiff cockney vampire zombies. Bloke wakes up from a come, finds himself all alone in London on a grey monday morning. Not a bleedin' soul. Stumbles into a church, gets attacked by a bunch of howling crazy red-eyed winos, and saved by a duo dressed in tank glasses and leather. The film only gets better and better, exploring some serious themes in a generously superficial manner: the individual against society (what bleeding society, they're all dead!), sexism (army squad saves hero and ladies, then tries to kill hero and rape ladies), abuse of power (same army squad) and armageddon (play with fire, get burnt).
Actually it was a cool movie, going lightly on the monster makeup and relying heavily on the viewer's own imagination. It may be too subtle for the US market, clearly a UK film, dry and sharp. Think of it as the film as the sequel to Resident Evil, without Milla Jovovich but with an equally sexy Naomie Harris.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
No, I'm not from IBM, or use VM. Most of my background is in aerospace stuff during the moon days of the 70's, where I watched it go from paradise to pot when our motto changed from "failure is not an option" to "faster, better, cheaper".
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
This film came out in the UK a few months back. It's basically a zombie flick, so you should ignore any scientific ponderings about the nature of viruses, and suspend disbelief.
However, this is in places an intelligent film, and worthy of good review. However, Varmus critisices the scientific implications of the film, whereas the artistic and social aspects of the film are much more insightful.
For example, the film contains a nice twist on the whole zombie-movie genre. The fact that in a post-apocolyptic world, the survivors will be the last people you want to inherit the earth (e.g. stupid young men tooled up with ridiculous firepower), is a good point, and speaks some volumes about the direction our world could go.