From my review on UGO.com.
“Everything’s so GREEEEEN!” – Mel Brooks as King Louis XVI after doing a line of cocaine in The History of the World, Part I , and Jordan Hoffman while screening A&E’s version of The Andromeda Strain
It is axiomatic that the book is always better than the movie. Once you’ve experienced a story from the inside out, a film (or TV) version will always seem ephemeral by comparison. There are a few arguable exceptions to this (The Shining and Alfred Hitchcock’s source material come to mind) but to me there is no better refutation of the rule that Robert Wise’s 1971 production of Michael Crichton’s medical thriller The Andromeda Strain. What in print is an airport- friendly page turner with an unfulfilling ending was transformed by Wise and the notable effects/design maestro Douglas Trumbull into a cinematic feast serving up twin helpings of candy colored psychedelia and future shock paranoia. The Andromeda Strain had an impact on design that lasted an entire decade, perhaps more so even than 2001: A Space Odyssey as it was a populist work. There are few films that can match it for tone. But, much like the book, it has a dingus ending that comes very close to ruining everything. For years I’ve been gunning for an updated version of The Andromeda Strain. And now, in an age when television events can have production values and writers equal to that of feature films, I nearly wet myself with anticipation at the news of A&E’s two-parter. Oh…the disappointment.
The basics: a satellite crashes back to Earth, is dragged home to a small town in a pickup truck, opened up and suddenly everyone drops dead. Well, almost everyone. Some people just go violently bananas for a while. . . except for an old drunk and a crying baby – a key clue from the earlier iterations that is held over more out of inertia than anything else. These two characters present the same revelations, except by this point in the new story we’ve moved on to bigger and badder problems. That is a common curiosity here. This version of The Andromeda Strain feels like someone retelling an old joke, but diminishing certain beats and emphasizing others based on who is in the audience.
The miniseries is set in an alternate now. The US has fallen victim to other bioterror attacks since the Anthrax letters of 2001. This specificity does an awful lot to destroy the grandeur of the threat as presented in the novel and film. Indeed, with frequent cuts to Presidential situation rooms and a double-crossing Army general, we are less in the minds of civilian doctors brought in to help treat an epidemic than in the last, lost episode of E-Ring.
There are twin protagonists here. Benjamin Bratt is winning and charismatic as Dr. Stone, the civilian doctor named head of Project Wildfire – Homeland Security’s “Oh Sh*t!” last measure against unexplained bioterror. Representing the age of embedded journalism is Eric McCormack, alarmingly bad as Jack Nash, the investigative reporter who won’t take no for an answer. Indeed, other than Bratt and Viola Davis as a medical research specialist, all of the acting is downright unbearable. The real mystery is not how to stop the killer virus from mutating, but how Christa Miller has an acting career. Imagine a cast where Ricky Schroeder is one of the strongest links and you’ve got this show.
Military and presidential scheming, no doubt an addition brought in to “open the story up” deflates all the tension that should be building. We don’t care at all about these characters and when we are with them at the Wildfire base it is a bland place to be. The opportunity to dazzle us with technology is wasted as we see the same old crap. The set looks like a BSG cast-off and the computer readouts have no originality. What was once multicolored is now just green.
By the time we get to night two there comes the problem of how to show when rivers or the very air is infected. The producers decided that slapping a haze of brown ought to do the trick. It looks like it was accomplished by my Mother with iMovie. What’s worse is that when the brown vapor descends on the Army there are…rock guitars!!! Veins bulge and blood turns to sand as the drums charge in and kick ass. Luckily, we have now entered the “bad enough it is campy” zone, so we’re having a good time now.
The final shame comes with the new ending. Here’s the punchline: it’s not bad. Maybe a little derivative of one of the Star Trek films, but it is a far better try than what was there before. One of the writers somewhere along the way solved the problem that’s been plaguing this property since day one. And it is yours for the taking if you can wade through the first three hours and forty five minutes.