You have this critic's permission to cry in public." The New York Times ' A. So is the movie, which keeps its head while digging into your heart. Meredith Droeger does too: as the Crowleys' afflicted daughter, she's a smart little bundle of fighting spirit. Richard Corliss of Time magazine wrote: "Fraser keeps the story anchored in reality. The site's general consensus is, "Despite a timely topic and a pair of heavyweight leads, Extraordinary Measures never feels like much more than a made-for-TV tearjerker." Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average score out of 0–100 reviews from film critics, has a rating score of 45 based on 33 reviews. Review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes gives the film an approval rating of 29% based on reviews from 142 critics and an average rating of 4.88 out of 10. According to Roger Ebert's review, the character is based on Yuan-Tsong Chen, a scientist and researcher from Duke University who collaborated with Genzyme in producing Myozyme, the drug which received FDA approval. Robert Stonehill's character is based upon scientist and researcher William Canfield, who founded Novazyme. The patent portfolio was cited in the press releases announcing the deal. Novazyme was developing a protein therapeutic, with several biological patents pending, to treat Pompe Disease, when it was bought by Genzyme. The larger company, called Zymagen in the film, was based on Genzyme in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The small start-up company Priozyme was based on Oklahoma City-based Novazyme.
#Extra ordinary movie cast series
Parts of the book first appeared as a series of articles in the Wall Street Journal. The screenplay by Robert Nelson Jacobs is based on Geeta Anand's book The Cure ( ISBN 9780060734398). Henceforth, more than 1000 infants born worldwide every year with Pompe disease will no longer face the prospect of death before reaching their first birthday for lack of a treatment for the condition. Myozyme, a drug developed for treating Pompe disease, was simultaneously approved for sale by the US Food and Drug Administration and the European Medicines Agency. Their non-fiction counterparts were diagnosed at 15 months and 7 days old and received treatment at 5 and 4, respectively. In the film, the children are 9 and 7 years old. During filming, the working title was The Untitled Crowley Project. This was the first time Nike allowed filming on their campus and they donated the location payment to Doernbecher Children’s Hospital. John Crowley makes a cameo appearance as a venture capitalist.Īdapted by Robert Nelson Jacobs from the nonfiction book The Cure: How a Father Raised $100 Million-and Bucked the Medical Establishment-in a Quest to Save His Children by the Pulitzer Prize journalist Geeta Anand, the film is also an examination of how medical research is conducted and financed.įilming in May 2009 at Pioneer Courthouse Square in Portland, Oregonįilming took place at several spots in and around Portland, Oregon, mostly at the OHSU Doernbecher Children's Hospital, Veterans Affairs Medical Center and the Nike campus in Beaverton, Oregon. The researchers race against time to save the children who have the disease. As time is running short, Stonehill's angry outburst hinders the company's faith in him, and the profit motive may upend John's hopes. This task proves very daunting for Stonehill, who already works around the clock. John takes on the task full-time to save his children's lives, launching a biotechnology research company working with venture capitalists and then rival teams of researchers. John and Aileen raise money to help Stonehill's research and the required clinical trials. John, an advertising executive, contacts Robert Stonehill ( Harrison Ford), a researcher in Nebraska who has done innovative research for an enzyme treatment for the rare disease. John Crowley ( Brendan Fraser) and his wife Aileen ( Keri Russell), are a Portland couple with two of their three children suffering from Pompe disease, a genetic anomaly that typically kills most children before their tenth birthdays.