Review of Smallpox

It is impressing. One man is shown to use the smallpox virus for a killing work that makes Hitler look like hardly more than a bad kid. Hitler needed a whole state to carry out his deeds. The terrorist in the movie did it alone. Well, probably not quite alone - it does not become clear where he has the Russian smallpox strain from. It can only be first-hand if he used to work in a lab - either in official Russian facilities or, more likely, somewhere in the Middle East where some Russian smallpox has been sold to (I'm sure it has, it's easy to steal a drop of the stuff from a whole tank). I don't see why people say the terrorist has created the smallpox himself (it is provably possible to do so, but I didn't hear it in the movie and it would not have been exactly the India-1). And I think the "his skin was blackened and he was covered in bleeding sores" about the first black pox case is some factual goof. Blisters filling with blood are possible, of course, they can leak through the central "navel" or just burst, too. But if a person is totally hemorrhagic, blackened and plainly dying after only three days of disease, it's early hemorrhagic smallpox. In such cases there are no "pox" as such. They have no time to develop. But I am willing to forgive it because it is a kind of illustration for the common audience - I know that blackened skin is subcutaneous hemorrhage, but not everybody does. Otherwise, I think, it is really well made and I feel safe to give the movie an 8.

Oh, and one thing I initially forgot: In reality, there could be even more dead... The movie takes the former natural lethality of smallpox (abut 30%) as a premise. But with a strain which has been through labs and probably modified, a higher lethality rate can hardly be ruled out (obviously).