The trailers for Harrison Ford‘s new movie Extraordinary Measures have been baffling. Are they cops, doctors, journalists, er whut? And why is everyone shouting?
Thanks to Roger Ebert‘s review, I now see that it’s a desperately-seeking-a-cure movie — as Ebert puts it, “Lorenzo’s Oil with a different disease.”
Brendan Fraser plays the desperate parent. Ford is the rule-breaking scientist, Robert Stonehill. Ebert:
Dr. Robert Stonehill doesn’t exist in real life. The Pompe cure was developed by Dr. Yuan-Tsong Chen and his colleagues while he was at Duke University. He is now director of the Institute of Biomedical Science in Taiwan. Harrison Ford, as this film’s executive producer, perhaps saw Stonehill as a plum role for himself; a rewrite was necessary because he couldn’t very well play Dr. Chen.
Here’s the full review.