Penumbral Lore; the Shadows of Science

Since Blogger has clearly given up on this project, I thought I’d try my hand at a movie review:

28 Days is a laughable movie. No one designs an experiment that way. When you’re designing an experiment, you have to control your variables. If ‘rage’ is an actual disease, study it as a disease, not as a psychological condition - and nothing in the following movie suggested that the infected reacted in any particular way to images of violence. Even assuming the scientists had more knowledge than the audience, why would chimpanzees react to images of human violence? Why not bombard them with images of chimpanzee violence? Why use chimps at all, rather than rhesus monkeys? Why use juvenile animals…? Admittedly, a government funded laboratory wouldn’t use human subjects for this sort of work, but that would be the best choice to get reliable data.

I did appreciate the death of the animal rights terrorists.  I felt it was the high point of the movie.

The infection was also ridiculous. If it creates inhuman, mindless rage then shouldn’t the infected tear each other limb from limb? Why would they stop attacking once they infected a victim? And how about that infection time? Ridiculous, and not particularly effective as a biowarfare agent (longer latency period, passive infection, death). The ‘radical alternate ending’ makes it clear that they weren’t even thinking in terms of science. The idea of a transfusion to replace ‘bad blood’ belongs to the fiction of a century ago. I won’t even address the insult of the video screens coming on.

There is nothing in this movie worth watching.

Sincerely Yours,

Dr. Debra “Debbie” Woo