Why didn't you warn me? I started this fun little adventure with the novel The Andromeda Strain back in college and enjoyed the book tremendously. If for nothing else, it was funny how much time and attention Michael Crichton spent on the "modern" technology and amazing computational advances. Of course, I read the book in the mid-'90s and he wrote it in the late '60s. It's even more hilariously dated now. You mean, 200 people can work at the same time on this mainframe computer? That's astounding!
So, it should have been pretty cool to see how they can update the basic premise of an alien(?) viral outbreak in the US to fit the modern technological and political landscape. And with A&E and Sci Fi working together on this, surely the two-part mini-series epic event should have been amazing, right? And yet I gave up back-to-back nights this past Monday and Tuesday for four hours of that?
I'll give it kudos for keeping to the spirit of the source material, in as much as it seems to obsess over showing modern technology in the same way the source material did. But who wrote this dialogue? It's like someone grabbed a book of popular sayings and just threw them into Crichton's novel. They even cooked up a batch of corporate espionage, mixed with a dash of government under-handed doings and the daring reporter who could uncover the whole thing. Maybe it was adapted by Woodward and Bernstein.
In the '60s, germ warfare was a relatively unconsidered field, and it was a much more innocent time. People were still in awe and wonder about the notion of space travel and NASA was a magical place. We loved and trusted our government still, for the most part. I guess we need a big dose of cynicism and corruption with our government and military entertainment these days.
Look how they gave each member of the Wildfire Team a piece of "smart paper" which would be updated with the latest information at all times. More of that obsession with showing us technology. And yet, the team didn't use the paper the rest of the show? And why would they need smart paper anyway? They're in a lab filled with computers and state of the art equipment in every room? I know because you spent forever showing me all the cool screens.
What an amazing all-star cast this feature has, too. The casting director diversified things for us because that's what you do in modern television. Don't want to under-represent any group and piss off their advocates. In the book the scientists were white males and the old man they found in the ravaged town of Piedmont was a white male. Oh, and that little baby? White male. They say write what you know and Crichton is a white male so why not. Oh, and all those spouses and drama there, yeah that didn't happen. Nor did Nash. Dammit the only real danger in the book was the Andromeda Virus and containing it. Where did all this other crap come from? Is this The Independence Day Strain? And why did the "Odd Man" have to be gay? Is that the only explanation for why he wouldn't be in a relationship? Only gay people don't get married; but wait, they're starting to.
It's sad to me that you can recognize all the trappings of a "big budget summer blockbuster." Special effects were clearly the biggest part of the budget, with writing, acting and basic plot structure running a close seventh or eighth on the priority list. And what was the deal with Christa Miller? Is she really that bad an actress? She was even more stilted and awkward in her line deliveries than she is on Scrubs. I remember liking her and thinking she was even kind of cute back in her Drew Carey Show days. Of course, the plastic surgery debacle that her face has become doesn't help any. "I'd look at you with a tender expression during our contrived 'connection' moment, but my face doesn't really move anymore. Sorry about that."
"No big deal. I'm just here so they can cross-promote my new summer series, The Cleaner, starring Benjamin Bratt." Clever boy that Benjamin Bratt. Regardless of how this series turned out, it's pretty high profile. And sci-fi geeks will tune into it even if it's terrible. We can't help ourselves.
And I didn't really need to see her boobs either (though at least those appear to still be hers) even if they were covered up with goop. That whole decontamination sequence tried to turn an uncomfortable and tedious process into some kind of sexually-charged situation with dramatic music and slow motion effects. I'd call it lame, but I don't think that word does the horribleness justice. At least Crichton made it dry and annoyingly drawn out as I'd expect the real experience to be.
As the cheese factor continued to rise, I think Sci Fi may have been better off keeping this one on their channel. At least on Sci Fi, you expect some cheese with your entertainment. A&E is supposed to be about classier fare ... like ... Gene Simmons' Family Jewels? What the hell happened to you, A&E?
You know what? If you really want to know all about this mini-series event, you can go ahead and just watch it. But if you've ever seen a summer "popcorn" movie, then you pretty much know how it's going to end. Right down to the corny cheering upon victory. And I'm going to go ahead and say that the reporter gets the girl in the end, even if we don't know it for certain. After all, when her boyfriend went crazy she pretty much abandoned him raving in the desert without a moment's hesitation.
Sure, he probably died shortly thereafter. But she didn't seem too worried about it when she picked up Will, I mean John Nash. She even had that crazy curly hair like Grace, and this time Will's straight. I mean Nash, sorry about that. And the girl smiled and giggled at him after a few minuted and it's like you'd never even have known she'd just gone through horribly traumatic ordeal. Maybe it was that manly scruffy beard.
I can't say much more about it, because I'm having myself committed for a few days until I can purge it from my system. In honor of the Pulitzer Prize winning screenwriter of this masterpiece, Robert Shenkkan, I bring you some ...
Great Moments in Dialogue (I fully expected CSI: Miami's David Caruso to pop on screen, whip off his sunglasses and deliver some of these lines.)
"What are you doing?" -- girl in truck to her boyfriend
"I'm about to go where no man has gone before." -- boyfriend
"Chuck, I've never seen you up this early before." -- Pres. Scott
"Few of us have your energy, Mr. President" -- Chuck
"Flattery will get you everywhere, won't it?" -- Scott
"Mr. Nash, it doesn't work like that." -- nurse to Jack Nash, leaving the clinic
"What doesn't? My addiction or my insurance?" -- Nash
"Well ... (quietly) both, really." -- nurse
"What's up?" -- Nash
"Not up ... down." -- a source
"Out of the ashes, into the fire." -- Dr. Keene, responding to Dr. Chou's change in vocation
"That's just a bunch of paranoid left-wing BS. It was never proven, Jeremy." -- Maj. Keene
"Just because you're paranoid, Bill, doesn't mean they ain't out to get you." -- Dr. Stone
"That was some spa." -- Keene after going through decontamination
"We do have our amenities." -- Stone
"So you were looking for the man most likely to kill himself ... and us." -- Dr. Barton, after learning Keen is the 'Odd Man out'
"Cool." -- Keene
"Maybe it just doesn't like to be poked." -- Noyce, discussing the Andromeda sample
"I showed you mine, now you show me yours." -- Nash to Stone on the phone
"What do you need, Stone? Tell me what you need to kill this thing ... and I'll get it." -- Gen. Manchek
"Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?" -- Ed Dewitt, responding to a run-down of all that's gone wrong
"Whether Andromeda is the newspaper or the delivery boy who is dropping it off, the message is loud and clear ... drop dead!" -- Keene
(Phone conversation)
"Desperate times call for desperate measures." -- Dr. Barton's husband referring to him cooking for the kids
"Tell me how desperate you are. In great detail." -- Dr. Barton laying back (Uh, is this how we start phone sex now?)
"No ball and chain for me." -- Keene
"Can't get a date, huh?" -- Barton
"If you don't ask, I won't tell." -- Keene
"I always thought that was a stupid policy." -- Keene
"We should go." -- girl in desert
"I gotta go." -- boy in desert, apparently needing to go #2 (And with no concern for wiping?)
"My name is Jack Nash and I'm a reporter with NNT; you probably know my face." -- Nash
"I just watch Colbert." -- girl from desert (culturally relevant)
"Right." -- Nash
"South Park, sometimes." -- girl from desert (So very culturally relevant.)
"What if Andromeda was sent to us by our future." -- Dr. Stone
"Okay, I think somebody has been working too hard and drinking way too much coffee." -- Barton
"You can run but you can't hide." -- Barton, responding to a possible solution to Andromeda
"Not wild about heights." -- Stone
"Don't look down. Stare straight ahead." -- the incredibly helpful Dr. Noyce (Because a forty-something year old man doesn't know how to manage his fears.)
"Sorry about your car." -- Nash
"Are you kidding? That was amazing. What you did." -- girl from desert, delivered in staccato first acting lesson fashion (Because who cares about your car getting blown up if it looks cool?)
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
5-29-2008 @ 11:55AM
lucyfan62 said...
Yipes! Well, I guess I can delete the recording from my DVR! I love the original movie...scared the crap out of me when I was a kid. Guess I'll just get the DVD out and watch that again!
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5-29-2008 @ 12:12PM
keithnl said...
Great Review and kudos to you for getting through it.
I made it as far as the description of the self destruct instruction scene. Then part of brain or maybe it was my soul died and I tuned out.
Right about Crichton, not to knock the guy beause I've read several of his novels and really enjoyed them, but they don't age well in parts. I forget which book it is, it might've been Congo, but I remember reading this really incredibly description of a piece of technology then realizing he was talking about a VCR.
I don't know why I expected quality from A&E but I remember the original being this stark disturbing techno thriller, I figued it would be similar in theme with a few more explosions.
Oh and was it just me but was Christa Miller doing some sort of high pitched funny voice? maybe she was trying to amuse herself.
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5-29-2008 @ 12:38PM
oceancitygirl said...
Actually, this was so bad that I think it actually became good. If David Caruso had appeared at the end in classic "H" pose #1 (hands on hips, sunglasses on) I would have called this 'genius'. It just made me laugh in all the wrong places. Christa Miller's acting was awful. She should turn in her SAG card.
Highlights included:
-The decontamination sequence- was so very wrong, yet I couldn't look away or change the channel.
-The birds attacking the soldiers. When a bird swarm approaches, you shoot and ask questions later!
-Will/Nash...why!?
-President's odd accent.
-Odd Man's thumb, thankfully they didn't need his eye. Ewww.
Ah, Will I mean Nash, what was the point of your character anyway? To keep my amused no doubt.
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5-29-2008 @ 12:38PM
Oreo said...
I found your problem very early on...
"I started this fun little adventure with the novel The Andromeda Strain back in college and enjoyed the book tremendously."
Right there, you thought the book was great. The first half of the book is great, then it goes nowhere very slowly and I don't even remember the ending. The book is bad. A movie based on a bad book is a bad movie.
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5-29-2008 @ 12:38PM
Edd said...
What a damn shame. I liked the book 10 years back and had heard of a TV adaption. Guess there's no need to watch it now.
Why do so many movies/serials etc. forget nowadays that the most important thing is story? Story and strong characters come from a strong script and it appears all of that was missing here. Such a shame to invest so much time and energy into a project, only to produce garbage.
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5-29-2008 @ 12:54PM
Vincent said...
Your review is pretty much spot on. Especially about Christa Miller. Her face and acting were a distraction. What happened there?
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5-29-2008 @ 1:32PM
Ian said...
I was so disappointed in this A&E production. The book was fantastic and the original film very innovative and enthralling, so I had high expectations for a modern adaptation. Then what did we get? A predictable corney SciFi type easy route thing. Lack of build on characters. Killing off so many so a follow up film with necessarilly have mostly new actors. Dumb lazy stuff.
Here take this card you will need it" And he falls to his death. Come on, the guy knew his thumb was essential. Then the predictable self sacrifice my another hacking off his thumb.. You know how hard that would be with a basic pen knife??? Come on all the shooting and stuff and lack of build as to what was going on in the Gvt/Military to make another firm tempting. The reporter seemed to have lots of his footage left on the cutting table as his part made little sense.
Cheap and easy way out A&E. Even I could produce a better film....
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5-29-2008 @ 2:22PM
Liz said...
I remember this as being my favorite of Crichton's books, although I read it when I was a teenager so who knows how it would stand up now. I was excited to see this miniseries but then never found out when it was on, so I missed it. Looks like I was lucky.
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5-29-2008 @ 3:25PM
Misty said...
In addition to all the wacky fun others have posted, I have a couple:
Tsi's grand mal seizure, from which he immediately woke up alert enough to mention "Oh hey, the lights made me seize", and strong enough to climb down and cut off the Odd Man's thumb. Uh huh. Sure.
And then can anyone tell me why Tsi died? Was the water radioactive? If they talked about the water being dangerous, I sure missed it.
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5-29-2008 @ 3:36PM
Michael said...
I read the original novel back when it was new (1970) and saw the original film in the theaters. There was no way this miniseries was ever going to be anything but a travesty. I decided to skip the two night airing (along with the umpteen billion commercials) and just rent the DVD if it surprised me and got good reviews. I agree so much with you Jason that this SHOULD have been ripe for an update but it sounds like they changed all the stuff they should have left alone and then skipped the things they could have updated. Leave it to network to screw up yet another classic novel. Personally, I think the original film still reigns as one of the great Sci-Fi classics of all time. This one? Not so much...
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5-29-2008 @ 3:38PM
Michael said...
Oh, BTW some of that cheesy dialog is lifted from the original source material so as much as we'd all like to blame A&E, it really isn't ALL their fault!
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5-29-2008 @ 3:42PM
ryan said...
Maybe you folks were just expecting too much from a TV movie... I quite enjoyed it. I agree that the acting by Miller was terrible, and Daniel Dae Kim's was even worse... but this didn't destroy the total experience for me.
It seemed to me that the series was filmed with the expectation that much more content would actually be aired -- plot elements like the e-paper, vent mining protest, and the number/picture code felt to me like they were intended to be more fleshed out but the scenes were never filmed or aired. Overall though they did a good job updating the plot to a modern context.
And what the hell is up with the rant against diversity? Have you ever worked in any technical office in the past 10 years? It would be ridiculously implausible if all of the workers remained white males as originally written given the factual diversity of a modern scientific/engineering demographic.
It seems that one of your primary complaints about the show is one I liked -- they added depth to each of the primary characters in order to (attempt) to make the viewer care about their plight. Each character had some aspect fleshed out to make them more interesting -- one was gay, working with an outbreak in China, addiction issues, marital troubles, trying to help family members escape, etc. Yeah they were all a departure from the book, but it was a good one.
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5-29-2008 @ 5:41PM
Brent McKee said...
I loved the original movie. It had an amazingly claustrophobic quality with the five main characters (the four doctors and the nurse) totally cut off from the outside world, and of course it had one of my favourite actresses, the amazing Kate Reid. The big thing though is that there didn't seem to be any extraneous elements. In the part of the miniseries that I've watched you have the reporter and the murder of his source, the Bratt character's marriage, the apparent conspiracy at the White House, and the whole oceanic vent drilling subplot that seemed to have absolutely no connection with anything else. I didn't know where this was going, and more importantly I didn't care. Cut out the extraneous clutter and you might just have a good two hour movie here.
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5-29-2008 @ 6:12PM
laura said...
BTW baby was a girl.
Moving on, I was so underwhelmed by this A&E movie, looking back at the promos they certainly sucked me in, god i am so gullible for anything sci-fi.
I knew something was amiss when i started hearing strangely familiar music, as in the song by Godspeed! you black emperor (28 days later) when something terrible was happening, and the music from the first resident evil (by marilyn manson) when they were doing lab stuff, they were almost the same scores.
And than the pres talked like Bill Clinton, and the CGI birds were attacking, and ....the fact that i was bored to death by hour 2, but knew i had to watch hour 3 and 4 the next day because it might get interesting!
it didnt
so i just made fun of it instead. The Red flowing down the hills straight out of Watership Down RUN BUNNIES RUN! the fact that Ricky Schroeder didnt die like a hero, instead he did a radiated belly flop and than got his thumb chopped off. the build up to an ending that petered out so quietly you could have heard the botox movin around in that scrubs chicks face.
darn you A&E
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5-31-2008 @ 2:34AM
Will said...
I actually enjoyed the first 2 hours & was looking forward to the conclusion, but it did derail badly the 2nd night. I suppose I could overlook the rather ridiculous parts (like the thumb cutting & the seizure thing) but what really made me laugh was the growing of the fungus (or whatever it was) & the goverment very impressive coordination in getting it loaded into trucks & spread in the critical spots, all in like 10 hours! We only have to look back at Katrina to know that there's no way in Hell the government could be that efficient. If something like this really happened, the country would be SOL, bigtime. They'd be digging A LOT of graves.
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