As a molecular biologist, this movie was cringe-inducing to watch. None of the science made any sense at all whatsoever, and while usually I can suspend my disbelief, there were a few reasons that didn't work here. First off, the plot is very 'science'-heavy - a good portion of the dialog is nonsensical scientific buzzwords being thrown around, with little character development or sideplot to make up for this. Literally, the characters are one dimensional. There's angry man guy, bad scientist boss, one-note protagonist girl, and bisexual friend. There is the list of characters. The only reason this rating even provides one star is because of the chemistry between the female actors.
Most offensively, they clearly had the money/opportunity to film this in a real (and very nice) laboratory; would it have been that much more effort to ask a scientist to look over their script and tell them half of it is BS, and change it since literally it doesn't matter to the story line? Would it have been that much of a pain to replace their pseudoscience enzyme with CRISPR/Cas-9, a real technology that could feasibly have been used for what they were doing? Also, why is there a repeated insistance that your samples can't be deteriorated at neutral pH? I promise you, I have had that happen a million times. The science is full of holes that show how low-effort the script was; most of this is easily google-able information.
Also, don't get me started on the cringe-inducing bad scientific technique here. Don't try and convince me you aren't experiencing severe contamination when none of y'all are wearing gloves to do your work. Or that you're leaving your samples of ENZYME at ROOM TEMPERATURE and it proceeds to do anything for you after that. After this, I am not even surprised they used an unbalanced centrifuge. I'm more surprised that it didn't hurt one of the actors during filming or break the lab equipment to do any of that.
Want a good indie sci-fi flick that makes no sense, but is at least engaging? Go watch Primer instead.
