TV Review: The Andromeda Strain

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.

The Andromeda Strain (2008) 

Overall		Story
Production		Acting

Where to begin?

Okay, 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.

Since I’m going to discuss the show in SPOILERy detail, let me skip to below the fold …

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.

Those general thoughts aside, there are a variety of other criticisms I took notes about while watching it.

1. Why is everybody so … young? All the scientists look like they are in their 30s at the latest, and young, model-like 30s at that. None of them look old enough to be the Top Scientists in Their Fields. Nor to have the lengthy backstories that they seem to have. The contrast to the 1971 film is particularly stark here.
2. The novel, and the 1971 film, left things a little vague about Andromeda’s origin and nature. It was probably extraterrestrial, and might have been sent as a “messenger” from elsewhere. This gets dramatically punched up in the miniseries, with wormholes (!) and time travel (!) and coded messages and a self-communicating virus and all that jazz. Apparently it being a highly deadly virus wasn’t good enough — it had to be a quasi-intelligent/telepathic, highly adaptive, uber-virus from the future! 
3. There’s an odd environmental riff that gets thrown into the whole tale. Because the future mined all their ocean floor volcanic vents (all of them!?) they managed to kill off all (!) of the single bacterium that could destroy Andromeda — which is why the future people sent Andromeda back from the future, through a wormhole, to when ocean floor mining was just getting started, to either warn their ancestors not to be dicks (said warning embedded in a secret code in the matrix that held the virus) or to kill them off. Which sounds counter-productively risky, but, hey, they’re future people, they know what they’re doing. Or what they did. Anyway, the moral of the story is, don’t kill off all the ocean floor bacteria. Okay, got it.
4. Um, I’m pretty certain that biological plagues don’t actually color the soil and water — and visibly spread the way the miniseries shows. It’s a shockingly cheap effect meant solely to pump up the tension, and it’s the sort of thing that went out in the 50s.
5. Those aren’t military helicopters, either. In fact, they don’t even look like military helicopters, except that they’re painted off-black.
6. Do we have scientists doing anything scientific? Well, Daniel Dae Kim does — in fact, he seems to be the only real scientist in the bunch, serving as Mr. Exposition at numerous key points. He also speaks flawless, unaccented Chinese for someone who defected not all that long ago. Meanwhile, though each of the people on the team supposedly has specialties, the miniseries just sort of blurs them together, without any real sense of this one is a microbiologist, this one is a surgeon, this one is a pathologist, etc. People seem do things (or watch the computer doing them) mostly so that they are in a room for particular bit of dialog, not because it’s appropriate to their touted expertise. (There’s also no support staff present in the labs — no nurses, research assistants, etc. Yeah, the computer is keen, but ..)
7. A huge part of the mystery Crichton sets up is why an old drunk and a tiny baby managed to survive in Piedmont. Cracking this — while not doing anything that would kill either of them — is a key plotline in the book and original move. In the miniseries, though, they show up, there’s some discussion with and about them, Christa Miller expresses maternal concern and interest in the baby, they provide some minor clues that go nowhere, then they vanish from the entire second half of the story. Which only makes sense, since the whole cause — and solution — for Andromeda have been radically changed.
8. All the renditions of the tale have a final, exciting climax where, upon a mutated Andromeda getting loose in Wildfire, the whole facility goes into shutdown and the nuclear self-destruct is armed. The scientist who’s there as the “Odd Man,” designated as the one who can best make the decision about disarming the self-destruct, has to climb to another level of the Wildfire facility to do so, in the service core. But the miniseries makes a bunch of changes here of dubious quality. First, since Benjamin Bratt (Dr Jeremy Stone) is the star of the show, he has to make the climb. But he’s not the “Odd Man,” which means Ricky Schroeder has to come, too. But this service core, full of conduit and all, doesn’t actually have, y’know, a ladder in it, for some odd reason. So Ricky falls to his death in the cooling tank of the nuclear reactor below (because, of course, everyone puts the cooling tank of a nuclear reactor open to the service core of the facility). But Benjamin can’t turn off the self-destruct without Ricky’s thumbprint, so Daniel Dae Kim has to climb down into the radioactive water (which kills him a minute later, in turn), cut off Ricky’s thumb, and flawlessly throw it up to Benjamin. Whacky! Good thing that, unlike an earlier security check in the show, the abort workstation uses a thumbprint, not a retinal scan …
9. For all the gruesomeness of the various deaths in Piedmont (including, amongst those driven mad, self-immolation and self-decapitation by chainsaw), I just didn’t feel the same sense of quiet, deathly horror as in the ’71 film. It feels much more pedestrian, which is not what you want to convey in a town that’s been decimated by an alien virus.
10. Um … security, anyone? Wildfire is a top secret bio-warfare/research facility whose very location is kept from the team, and we’re in the middle of a major crisis that can’t be leaked to the public lest there massive panic. But people get to make calls out practically at will (or whenever it’s convenient to the plot) — and when the comm lines are disabled (which is meant to be sinister, not, y’know, secure), Benjamin bypasses it by getting the guy at the front gate to hook him up through his cell phone. Great guards there, y’know? And, of course, who does Benjamin, the head of the project and the person who should be most security-conscious, call? Our fearless addicted investigative reporter. (Yeah, he’s not trusting the info he’s being given through official channels– but the whole scene just seems ludicrous.)
11. The whole thing is set in a vague near-future — but it’s frustrating figuring out what’s supposed to be just advanced technology and what’s just bad writing shortcuts. Lots of videophones, evidently. And voice-controlled AI for the Wildfire computer. And, maybe, touch-screen interfaces. But everything else looks … well, exactly the same.
12. Things keep getting left in from the original story but stripped of their meaning. We still have the jet pilot whose plastic all disintegrates — but the significance of that (Andromeda is mutating, and will likely become harmless) doesn’t fit the new narrative, so now it becomes either a random mutation, or a sign of how Andromeda is insidiously adapting and intentionally manipulating things to get itself nuked so as to mutate further. Similarly, Daniel Dae Kim’s character is epileptic still, but rather than being used it the plot to explain why he missed a lab result (since the computer’s doing all the real work), instead when the lab goes into self-destruct shutdown, the flashing lights trigger a seizure and he stumbles and breaks the destruct abort controls for that level. Wow. Fragile controls they have there.  Then he gets all better (until he dies shortly thereafter).
13. Most bumbling, inept government conspiracy ever. Except for maybe Nixon’s Plumbers. Brutal and ruthless when subtlety would be best, soft and indecisive when firm action is needed, and way too complicated to work. Though maybe that’s indicative of why there aren’t as many government conspiracies as people think. Pretty goofy military types, too. General Manchek goes from evil dark menace to wimpily knuckling under to Stone to being a gung-ho pal to the Wildfire team. 
14. Why is Ricky Schroeder — here a military doctor, long-time nemesis of Jeremy Stone, and hotshot military dude — so ignorant of the military implications of all of the Wildfire arrangements (e.g., not understanding about why there’s a jet shadowing them as they’re on the
    helicopter to Piedmont)? Half the time he’s a steely-eyed “nuke ’em from orbit” type, the other half he’s a gosh-shucks nice guy. And, as far as that goes, why change the Odd Man role from another scientist to a military doctor (except to provide some moments where there’s interpersonal bristling, which vanishes as conveniently as it shows up)?
15. Speaking of which, and not just related to Ricky, the acting is pretty pedestrian. Benjamin Bratt was good enough on Law & Order, but he simply can’t carry off being a distinguished scientist, even a loose cannon of one. None of the actors does spectacularly, and for many of them it’s not clear that they could, but even Olivier couldn’t make that plot or dialog shine.
16. It’s not specifically the production’s fault, but a word to A&E: It’s hard to take seriously a taut, exciting techno-thriller when one of the sponsors (along with a lengthy ad) is for Get Smart., a satire of taut, exciting techno-thrillers. The integration of the Ford ad (which actually starts with a couple in a Ford in driving into Piedmont, then hightailing it back to the Big City) was better, but oddly disturbing (“They’ve broken quarantine!”).

To be fair, there were a few elements I liked of note:

1. The president was pretty cool. Of all the “outside world” extraneous bits and characters, he was the best.
2. The use of flashbacks from the drunk to show what happened that night in Piedmont was nicely done. It breaks the narrative stream and the “time counting down” sense of the original … but since that’s already hopelessly fractured in the miniseries, it works okay here.
3. There were some keen computer graphics, at least at Wildfire. Some of the CG work (with birds and helicopters) was … okay, but didn’t hold up to their frequent use.
4. Showing how the infection spread through wildlife vectors was fun — if muddled a bit by the whole quasi-intelligent virus schtick.

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 from A&E.