Customer Reviews

The Andromeda Strain Miniseries

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(11)
1 star:		(46)

 

 

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.

Only a few minutes into this mess I was disgusted to find that it was just one more awful portrayal of emotionally stunted scientists. The writing and direction convey not an ounce of urgency. No one on the Wildfire A-team rounded up by the government seems even remotely shocked or disturbed by the 99% mortality rate of a mysterious new disease! When a top surgeon is first told about this microbial juggernaut she smirks and says, "Gee, you always have such good news for me." Then the two go on to chit chat about petty family problems.

The cynicism of these characters is truly stupefying. If you have ever watched a few science documentaries, particularly those dealing with public health, you will know that real scientists are often driven by deep emotions and passions. Dullards like those found in "The Andromeda Strain (2008)" exist only in the lazy minds of subliterate hack writers.

Please note that the recent SARS outbreak six years ago had a mortality rate of about 10%! Our CDC and health agencies all over the world went into hight gear to understand the disease and to check its progress. In this crummy flick - which so earnestly throws around scientific lingo to establish credibility - the field of epidemiology is reduced to a cheap soap opera.

Good science fiction must be grounded in reality. The only way to put science-based heroism up on the screen is to first understand the heroism of real scientists. The disease warriors who literally risk their lives every day are a thousand times more interesting than the autistic bores found here. If real scientists dragged their feet this way, we still wouldn't have a cure for polio.

The person who wrote this movie:
1) Never read the original book and got how great it was
2) Never saw the original 1971 movie and got how great it was
3) Just doesn't get Sci-Fi
4) Can't write

Nuf Said

I am sick and tired of expecting what should be a well thought out, sharply scripted, well-acted, and entertaining foray into one of the great classics of hard science fiction only to be hit over the head with another "Save the environment" preachy film. When I want good preaching I attend church.

Save your money from this garbage and find a new copy of the "Super Friends", much more fun and entertaining.

Intellectually insulting on so many levels, it is indeed a strain to watch this overpopulated, overly-politicized and overly-violent drivel. The original far surpasses this wretched remake in visual impact, acting and suspense. Spoiler alert: of all the ridiculous "plot updates" (and there were too many to count), the thumb-severing was the most jaw-droppingly absurd. The original stands as an elegant, intelligent, suspenseful, thought-provoking classic. I'll watch it again as soon as possible to decontaminate myself from this latest Hollywood Strain.

Why did they remake this movie? Having chosen to remake the film, why did they feel it necessary to depart from the book and original film script by adding in at least ten additional impossibilities? I only hope that people who see this very silly miniseries won't assume that the original book and movie were equally implausible. Did Michael Chrichton OK this thing? If so, he deserves to share an eternal coach airline seat with Tom Clancy, who allowed the movie Adaptation of the Sum of All Fears. In both cases the movie is so much less than the book. Do they call this creativity? It would have been better if all involved had taken a long vacation somewhere, with no cameras...

Although my memory of them are vague, I have fond memories of both the original Michael Crichton novel and the 1971 film adaptation. So when I learned about the remake of the story, a four-hour miniseries, no less, I was very excited to see what would be done with this new incarnation of the Crichton thriller. Unfortunately the answer is "not much."

Probably the prototype for the classic "plague-sweeping-the-world" thriller, The Andromeda Strain in its original form is an exciting roller coaster ride of a thrillfest that kept you on the edge of your seat. The Andromeda Strain Miniseries, while not the worst film I've ever seen, or close to it, was a big disappointment compared to the expectations I had. Much of the plot and some of the characters were far too contrived, more like extraneous elements thrown in for effect than being integral parts of the tale. Although I enjoy a good government conspiracy story like the next guy or gal, the one woven into this piddling plot left me expecting to see the bad guys don black hats, grow long, thin mustaches, and cackle evilly as they grin into the camera for effect. Eric McCormack's character, the obligatory "whistle-blower, drug addict" that the government goes to the utmost ridiculous efforts to eliminate seemed so unnecessary that I began wanting to kill him myself.

Another flaw of this film is that it's practically got the words "deux ex machina" branded visibly onto every twist and turn, and some of those twists were as confounding as a dog trying to catch his own tail. If anyone sees this movie and thinks it even remotely reflects the writing skills of the original author, Michael Crichton, they will be grossly mistaken. In fact I feel that the author should the makers of this film for defamation of character, libel, character assassination, and any other trumped up charge humanly possible. In fact, the more I write about this movie, the more I realize just how much I dislike it.

In reality, the movie's no worse than a high budget "B" movie, somewhat like those that have become the staple of the Sci Fi Channel. The problem is that this film had much more promise, expectation, and a far higher foundation to build upon than most of those films, and somehow wound up being worse than those films. Those films knowingly don't take themselves seriously, but this film I feel wasn't taken nearly seriously enough. I hope the actors in this movie got paid well, because they certainly won't be getting any big time starring roles based on their work here. They all did their best with what they had, but unfortunately something from nothing is still nothing.

This is a first for me, but if I have to rate this film on a scale from 1 to 5, then I'd give it a 1. And except for those who are fans of completely mindless fun (and I'm not even sure this film qualifies as such), then the movie should be rated a negative 2. And since I rarely watch a film I find so many faults with, I think this film's failure is really sad.

- Gregory Bernard Banks, author, reader, reviewer

I read the book and saw the original movie years ago and was looking forward to seeing the remake. Since I was away for the weekend when this was broadcast, I recorded it for future viewing. So far I have fallen asleep three times without getting through it. Somehow I get the feeling that I'm not really missing much. I just can't seem to get engrossed enough to stay awake.