andromeda
We watched the end of the new Andromeda Strain mini-series on A&E last night…
For the most part it was a decent series. Enjoyable, interesting, thrilling… Certainly kept me riveted to my television for about 4 hours, which is rather difficult to do.
I really enjoyed how they brought the story up to speed and incorporated modern events.
Cell phones were used extensively to bypass the government’s attempt at censorship. And there was a pervasive sense the government was being less-than-open about what was going on. There was more talk about international politics – the bombing of Utah had as much political fallout as nuclear.
I did not like how they changed the story itself though…
In the book (and original movie) Andromeda was a genuinely alien disease. An asteroid/meteor/whatever crashed into one of our satellites, contaminated it with Andromeda, and knocked it down.
In the new mini-series it turns out that Andromeda was sent back in time from the future because they didn’t have the bacteria necessary to kill Andromeda anymore.
That’s right, they kill Andromeda. In the book Andromeda is never killed. It is just plain too alien and too weird to combat with anything we know. It eventually mutates into a rubber-eating variety and becomes (mostly) harmless and that is what saves the world. Not human ingenuity – just dumb luck. But I guess that isn’t popular anymore…
They also tried way too hard to simultaneously have a trustworthy President and and evil government. There were two or three conspiracies going at any point in time. One official was hiding secrets from another… One department didn’t know what the other one was doing… One person is getting blackmailed, another one is being framed as a terrorist…
Then you’ve got the whole “vent mining” thing thrown in there just to put an ecological spin on things. Throw in some militant eco-terrorists, strongly suggest that the President (or his cronies) are only in it for the money, and throw in the rare bacteria that saves the day.
Oh, and did I mention that Andromeda is intelligent? All its disparate parts can communicate with each-other to adapt to new threats. And it is intelligently mutating to spread into different hosts. And it intentionally attacked the plane carrying the nuke.
It just seems to me that a killer disease from space is probably enough. The world being slowly devoured by a microorganism that we’ve never seen before, cannot begin to understand, and cannot stop is suspenseful enough. You don’t need to throw in all the other crap to keep people interested. And after a while it just starts being silly.
Still, despite my complaints it was a pretty good movie.
They did a great job of presenting just how screwed we might be if the wrong disease pops up in the right place. They showed just how hard it can be to actually quarantine an area, and how devastating just a couple leaks could be. If it wasn’t for their deus ex machina at the end humanity would have been wiped out.