Andromeda Strain [DVD] [2008] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC]

Short Review:

It's bad.

Long Review:

I don't blame the actors, I believe they did what they could with the script they had.

I think the special effects were adequate, some of the tech stuff was a bit overdone and detracted from the story. For example, a lab technician running the tests would have been more realistic to me than a computer that can run any imaginable test immediately by voice command.

The subplots were waaaaaay out of control. By having so many side stories, the main story was diluted and couldn't build a sense of urgency.

The preachy environmentalist message changed what might have been an enjoyable sci-fi drama into yet another in a long line of 'save the Earth' movies. Don't get me wrong. I like the Earth. I really do. It's one of my favorite planets. I just don't need to be clubbed over the head with yet another environmentalist lecture. I think the movie as a whole would have been much better off without it.

If those were all the failings, I probably would have given this 3 or 4 stars. I could have suspended disbelief and enjoyed the show. But...

The wormhole/time travel element was so incredibly bad that it killed the movie for me. The story would have been so much better if they had just left the origin of Andromeda as an unknown. Simply say 'It came from somewhere in space.' and be done with it. But, if you're determined to use time travel as a story element, at least don't cause a paradox.

Minor Things that Irritated Me:

It appears that to be an effective doctor or scientist, one must be young and attractive. I suppose that anyone who is old, fat or just plain ugly could not possibly be of any help finding a cure to an infectious disease.

The 'cure' confused me. The progress of Andromeda was shown by the water and vegitation turning brown as Andromeda killed it. When the benevolent virus was released and consumed Andromeda, everything turned green again... did all the plants suddenly come back to life? Will the animals? Will the people?

I have a little problem with the idea that the sterno drinker who takes a bottle of aspirin a day and vomits huge amounts of blood was casually invited over to the fire station for a poker game. In my experience, the destitute and chronically ill are either a) hospitalized or b) shunned. I don't know, maybe it's a Utah thing.

In Conclusion:

This movie had a lot of things going for it. Unfortunately, it could not overcome a horribly ill-conceived script.

If you're looking for a taut, tense story about the outbreak of an alien plague and the desperate efforts of a band of scientists to isolate and defeat it ... then I suggest reading the original The Andromeda Strain novel, by Michael Crichton. Or, if you're video-centric, check out the 1971 movie adaptation. In either case, skip this A&E two-night miniseries.

I'll start with the caveat that I am quite fond of both the book and the 1971 movie (one of the first movies I remember going to -- we were not a big movie-going family). I was looking forward to this miniseries to refresh and expand on Crichton's story, updating it for a new generation. Instead, the core novel has been turned into soap opera mush, and the added time available (180 minutes, minus commercials) is wasted on a parallel conspiracy theory story that not only adds nothing, but never really gets resolved.

This is a "hard" SF novel, focused on the science involved in diagnosing and dealing with Andromeda. Secondarily, it's about the pressure upon the four scientists (expanded to five in the miniseries, and all but the main one renamed), faced with multiple ticking clocks and a pathogenic horror that could, if unchecked, kill the world as efficiently as it's killed the town of Piedmont (Arizona in the book, New Mexico in the 1971 movie, Utah in 2008).

The miniseries turns the science into random and unfocused gobbledigook, including a talking computer that, evidently, does pretty much all the work for the research team. That leaves everyone time to chit-chat, mull over romances past and present, and hint at past events that are never explained (or that really aren't all that germane to the story). Meanwhile ...

The original novel and movie did include a bit of "conspiracy" about them. While Wildfire was originally set up by Congress at Dr Stone's recommendation, it was to decontaminate space probes and astronauts and deal with any infections they might bring back. The government looked upon it, and Project Scoop, as a way to gather and develop potential bioweapons; this comes out over the course of the original tale, but is really a sidelight to it, an addition to the caution that we Need To Be Careful Out There.

That's the part, though, that gets all the padding in the new miniseries. We get multiple government factions -- the DoD bioweapons head, his army gunsel, Homeland Security, a hapless president, a general whose motivations are mysterious -- and, of course, a doughty (and drug-addicted) journalist who's trying to track down this story and stay one step ahead of both the virus and the assassins sent to do him in.

(Yawn.)

It's layering cheap icing on the cake. It never really adds much -- except to distract from both the core story (which is bad) and the melodrama back at Wildfire (which, I guess, is good). You could excise the entire mess from the miniseries, and it wouldn't make a bit of difference to its resolution, but it would ratchet up the tension at Wildfire, rather than deflating it every time we cut to another scene.

There's so much more to criticize -- scientists too young (and pretty) for the long and distinguished careers they're supposed to have; the world's most incompetent governmental conspiracy; the laugh-out-loud climactic race against the Wildfire auto-destruct; the baby and old man who vanish after the first half; a telepathic, self-aware, highly-adaptive uber-virus that came from the future through a wormhole; egregious firing-squad breaches of security at a highly classified installation ... the list goes on.

When I saw ads in the movie theater for the miniseries, my thought was, "Wow, it looks like The Andromeda Strain, only with car crashes." I was at least partly correct: there were car crashes. But despite being able to be summed up with the same short paragraph in TV guide, I don't see much of the book, or original movie in here -- and that's a shame. In short, where this miniseries parallels the original, it does so in a muddled, mediocre fashion. Where it doesn't, it's even weaker. It adds nothing new to the original's vision, and the new stuff it does add feels more like it's one of those awful SciFi original movies than something from A&E.

My main problem with this re-make was that the main plot got buried under a bunch of sub-plots that really didn't give anything to the movie. Then there was the techno-babble (Bucky Balls, Wormholes, Messenger Theory, Thermal Vent Mining) that brought nothing but confusion to the story.

Don't waste your money on this one, go buy the Original 1971 version.