Post by rra on May 28, 2008 0:43:01 GMT -5
THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN (2008) - ***
About 40 years ago, Harvard Medical School graduate Michael Crichton's super best-seller THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN was published, a book written at a time when technologies such as the Personal Computer, Cell phones, the Internet, and the iPod were futurism this side of STAR TREK. Yet the very premise of an unexplainable, untreatable and unstoppable apocalyptical virus crashing down to Earth via a falling satellite is still chillingly relevant, what with modern fears of the biological WMD thread, and the recent global health scares with SARS and the Bird Flu.
So major Hollywood directors Sir Ridley and Tony Scott present this 4-hour TV mini-series adaptation that kept the novel's basic storyline of American government scientists trying to analyze and stop this potential doomsday plague deep down in an underground bunker in the middle of nowhere, all the while trying to include contemporary geo-political issues and themes.
But I think the filmmakers lost a key critical ingredient that made Crichton's book so good (same with the 1971 Robert Wise movie if I remember right) in the first place when they intercut the Wildfire team narrative with several sub-plots featuring above-surface characters trying to contend with the title villain. Thus they ditch the novel's "closed circuit" storytelling, which was good drama and great suspense as we're stuck with these 5 people in a hellhole throughout this whole ordeal, and as a result, the TV adaptation dilutes the material's strongest stimuli.
That said, I still enjoyed this production, and I liked how everybody distrusts each other. Top scientist and Wildfire leader Benjamin Bratt distrusts the Army General because he thinks the latter blew up evidence that the U.S. government sold bio-weapons to Saddam Hussein, while the General think Bratt is a paranoid anti-government left-winger. A Wildfire team member doesn’t like the Chinese defector because of his association with a breakout in Shanghai. Bratt's kid thinks he abandoned his mother, The news media don't want to rely on reporter Eric McCormack (the gay-half of WILL & GRACE) because of his drug-use and petty grudges, and McCormack has grudges with apparently everyone. After the cliffhanger with the accidentally armed nuclear weapon, the American people don't believe the government's explanation for what happened, and the U.S. President thinks all his underlings are more interested in spin doctoring instead of solving the problem.
I guess its just the times we live in.
Interestingly, this project started out as a 6-hour mini-series for the Sci-Fi Channel, and I really shudder at the plot stretching they would have done to justify that running time. I'm not saying the storylines are terrible, but scenes with the Army conspiracy after McCormack and Bratt's domestic problems...they're plot-fillers that we've seen way too much of before, and which didn't need anymore coverage.
What I did think silly though was when an environmentalist terrorist group hijacks a drilling platform, owned by a company with Presidential ties too close to comfort this side of Dick Cheney and Halliburton, and I think, give me a break. Yeah there are quite a few American eco-freaks willing to use force, but what have they done beyond freeing monkeys contaminated with lethal diseases into the public, sabotaging deforestation vehicles, and throwing bottles full of urine at cops? My point is, I fear Swedish aggression more than these people. Does this have any coincidence with Crichton himself calling environmentalism a "fanatical religion" in recent years?
Now what really annoyed me with STRAIN is when the whole time travel gibberish comes into play. For a story essentially based upon a lot of real science, to introduce such fantastical elements into the fray...something about that I don't dig. Hey, wormhole stuff works for something like STAR TREK or whatever fiction that has to cheat science to make the story work, but in STRAIN its just out of place for me. Oddly, this is the second movie in as many days for me where the predestination paradox is the narrative's clutch, after PRINCE OF DARKNESS.
My crying aside, STRAIN was solid entertainment, or "event" television of which used to span several nights on the major networks decades ago, but now the bread & butter of cable channels, like HBO's excellent JOHN ADAMS from earlier this year.