aarakis

This movie was clearly made for the China market. From the opening scenes, it's obvious that the filmmakers had a specific audience in mind-an audience that expects a certain kind of morality, a certain visual polish, and most definitely, a particular narrative structure. One of the more telling signs is the depiction of the police force. Judging by the uniforms and attitudes, the officers portrayed must be the pre-1997 Royal Hong Kong Police. Why? Because post-handover police, at least in the cinematic world approved for mainland distribution, have no bad apples. Every officer is a paragon of discipline and virtue, without a hint of corruption or moral ambiguity. It's almost as if someone scrubbed the script clean with ideological disinfectant.

Of course, I'm being facetious-but only slightly.

We get cardboard-cutout heroes: two male leads who appear to have been genetically engineered for moral uprightness. They never make the wrong call, they never lose their cool, and they always say the right thing. It's not that they're unlikable-they're just too perfect to be interesting. They lack the internal conflict or character flaws that would make them feel real. These aren't men with haunted pasts or complex motivations; they're avatars of state-approved justice.

Then there's the acting, which is wildly uneven. The actresses, in particular, seem to have been instructed to dial everything up to eleven. Every emotion is exaggerated, every reaction laced with melodrama. It's the kind of over-acting that was common in stage acting, and it feels out of place in what's supposed to be a modern action-thriller. Whether it was a directorial choice or an attempt to appeal to certain dramatic sensibilities, it ends up being distracting more than anything else.

From BBC News: Every newborn baby in England will have their DNA mapped to assess their risk of hundreds of diseases, under NHS plans for the next 10 years. The Department for Health and Social Care said that genomics - the study of genes - and AI would be used to "revolutionise prevention" and provide faster diagnoses and an "early warning signal for disease".

Screening newborn babies for rare diseases will involve sequencing their complete DNA using blood samples from their umbilical cord, taken shortly after birth. Funding for the new initiative will also support efforts by Genomics England to build one of the world's largest research databases, with the goal of containing over 500,000 genomes by 2030.

It builds on work the NHS carried out in recent months, in which it embarked on a study to track the entire genetic code of up to 100,000 newborn babies in England to screen for genetic conditions.