Review: Extraordinary Measures

I'm swamped at work, but just wanted to point out the new Brendan Fraser/Harrison Ford movie, Extraordinary Measures. (Warning: somewhat spoilerish.)

I had a mixed reaction to the film, which is about a father of three children, two of whom have a life-threatening and degenerative disease, who teams with a maverick scientist to look for a treatment that could save his kids' lives. But the mixed reaction was not because the film was half bad and half good. In fact, there was a lot of good: the father's willingness to do anything to achieve his values, the scientist's dedication to truth, the fact that the filmmakers didn't present the children's situation as the fault of Big Pharma, but rather presenting the metaphysically given difficulty of translating theoretical research into a usable pharmaceutical. I really enjoyed the heroic actions of and the interplay between the two main characters.

What made me truly, truly angry about this movie is that it's too kind to the government.

The story of a father and a scientist bringing their minds to bear on a difficult problem and making a breakthrough in medicine made me angry...because I am convinced that in the world we actually live in, the FDA would not let such a thing happen. The children in the film would have been dead before the government decided that a new treatment was safe enough to be tested in humans -- just ask the families of Anna Tomalis or Abigail Burroughs. Government officials think they are more qualified to decide whether the benefits of a new drug are worth the risk than the patients who will die without those drugs. Maybe they'll die with the drugs -- but if you were a dying patient -- or the parent of a dying child -- wouldn't you want to be the one who decides whether or not to take a chance?

Go see Extraordinary Measures, but know that there's a villain in the real world who doesn't show up in the movie -- and that villain must be destroyed.