What combats Andromeda in the end is something simple and primitive and endangered. It never grows quite suspenseful enough, and it rests on the rather un-sci-fi-ish idea that the future is a benign force, like a mentor uncle with something meaningful to teach us about our venality and callous disregard for the Earth. “The Andromeda Strain” packs its suitcase so heavily, it cannot travel. I’m an American citizen with a very public profile.” He seems to be a teenage boy lashing out at an unfair suspension at school. “I’m not some hapless Middle-Eastern exchange student with an out-of-date visa. “Listen to me you little tin-pot fascist,” he says. For all of his trespassing and probing, he is being held as a terrorist under the Homeland Security Act, and when he is locked up, he throws quite a dart at the officer in charge. Tracking the story of the government’s efforts to squelch the Andromeda debacle is a drug-addled journalist played by Eric McCormack of “Will & Grace,” an unlikely representative for a national mood of reasoned rage. Dead birds begin falling from the sky, and North Korea suspects that the United States is purposefully testing its nuclear capabilities. In the course of the team’s investigation a nuclear device is detonated. Diyah Pera/A&EĮither directly or by implication, the movie addresses not only the military’s sexual policies but also its unethical detention practices, the injustices of campaign-finance law, bio-terrorism, corporate environmental insensitivity, the suppression of free speech and the North Korean nuclear threat. Though he is sequestered in a clock-is-ticking bunker lab with his attentive colleagues, the script provides him with enough time to run on a treadmill and declare his passions to an attractive former research associate, one of the many other women who caused the dissolution of his marriage.įrom left, standing, Benjamin Bratt, Christa Miller and Ricky Schroder in The Andromeda Strain, an A&E mini-series adapted from the Michael Crichton novel. He looks dressed for a weekend in South Beach, and amid the film’s urgent atmosphere, he adds all the tension of someone conducting a tax audit. Jeremy Stone of the novel, is played here by Benjamin Bratt in a tight-fitting T-shirt, should immediately give us pause. The military is called in to contain the disaster, and a team of high-status scientific researchers is assembled to determine the capacities of whatever is causing this plague and thus forestall the end of civilization. Less faithful to the original text than Robert Wise’s 1971 film, the current version, whose executive producers include Tony and Ridley Scott, retains the essential elements of the plot: a government satellite on an intergalactic germ-related fact-finding mission crashes into a small town out West, emitting a deadly pathogen that kills everyone nearby save for an unhealthy older man and a baby whose survival is an epidemiological mystery. In its most recent adaptation, as a four-hour mini-series beginning Monday night on A&E, it quakes with the noise of nearly every threat to our national well-being. Since the 1980s “The Andromeda Strain” could be read as an AIDS or Ebola or bird-flu novel. At the time of its publication it spoke not only to cold war fears but also to more up-to-the-minute notions that lunar missions might result in the importation of perilous contaminants from the Moon. It can shape-shift into a dozen metaphors. “The Andromeda Strain,” Michael Crichton’s 1969 novel, written while he was still a medical student at Harvard, is like one of the mutations the book painstakingly describes.
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