Weird Science

Conditions: Snow-ish

Eyes Wide Shut

Finally the shady world of human-animal experimentation is calling for some regulation on it's practices

FRANKENSTEIN animal experiments must be controlled more tightly to stop scientists racing ahead with research that creates monsters, experts warned.

They called yesterday for a watchdog to monitor implants in animals and urged it to kill off mixed animal/human embryos at 14 days. The Academy of Medical Sciences said the public broadly supported animal research but was opposed to anything that might make them more like us. It follows news that scientists are close to replacing whole brains in monkeys with human cells.

The Academy said: “There is a Frankenstein fear that research which creates ‘humanised’ animals is going to generate ‘monsters’.”

- mirror.co.uk/news/

I for one welcome this opportunity for the Animal-Human hybrid creators of the future to open up their work to the greater scientific community, not only for the betterment of their practices, but also for the chance for their work to receive the true recognition that it deserves!



Film Review: X-Men First Class

Prequels are always a tricky business, as characters that we already know about are "put in peril", but of course are not actually in peril as they have to show up in the next film. Furthermore, we already know who the characters are and what arcs they are going to end up on, so a lot of the potential surprise of discovery is lost. X-Men First Class is not really an exception to this, putting forward the story of what happened to Magneto to make him the genocidal maniac he turns out to be, and how Professor X became Professor X, and why the two of them are friends. It's the 60's, and the U.S government is standing toe to toe against the Russians over American nuclear missiles in Turkey, and Russian nuclear missiles in Cuba. Turns out the whole standoff was engineered by Kevin Bacon, who I didn't even know was in the film, and is the bad guy. Kevin wants to provoke a nuclear World War 3 because then he and his fellow mutants will rule the world, and he's got a nifty Dr-Evil style submarine to charge around in to try and make it happen.

Professor X and Magneto (not yet their actual nicknames) team up for the CIA in order to recruit a bunch of mutants to go against him, but of course Magneto has his own plans and ideas, since Kevin was also the guy who tormented him back in the Nazi camp so many prequels ago. And it turns out Mystique and X knew each other well from a very young age, she spending her youth pretending to look normal before Magneto eventually persuades her that she should not hide who she is. Unless she's actively, you know, being someone else.

Anyway, while the film is quite clever, managing to ramp up the tension as the Cuban Missile crisis comes into full swing with the X-Men right in the middle of it all, the problem with the film is that it doesn't have a lot of depth to it. It's so busy setting up characters and establishing the plot that the actual character development that makes a film work is greatly compressed. Mystique's character especially suffers from this, as she seems to make some big decisions seemingly out of nowhere. Anyway, James McAvoy(X) and Michael Fassbender (Magneto) are really spot-on in their portrayals of the younger versions of these characters, there's something about putting English actors into American action movies that just works. Director Matthew Vaughn has managed to put this film together quite well, delivering a good spectacle that actually has a beating heart at it's center. It's actually a shame that this is a prequel, and that they didn't start with this one. Would have worked even better. Three and a half coins out of Five.


- Peace out