The Andromeda Strain

The tagline for The Andromeda Strain is It's a bad day to be human but it should read It's a bad day to be a viewer.

I'm talking about that 2-part miniseries on A&E this week based on the 1969 book by Michael Crichton. It's gotten some pretty decent reviews but I thought it was only barely watchable. It started off horribly. In the first minute or so of the movie we had two teens necking in the back of a truck, then an apparent meteorite streaked within a few yards of them, striking the ground within walking distance of their truck. They leaned over the hole in the desert where it struck--digging a hole only a foot or so deep, by the way--and soon lifted it onto the bed of their truck and brought it back to town.

See any technical problems there? After getting off to a rocky start the middle of the 4 hour movie is pretty good, if you can excuse some of the worst animatronic animals I've ever witnessed, but the movie quality lapses again near the end.

There were so many technical gaffes that it's pointless to enumerate them (but feel free to mention any that bothered you in the comments section) however the one that particularly bothered me, and lots of films do this, is the speed at which biological processes are described as working. You can't produce thousands of pounds of bacteria in bioreactors in 10 hours. Nor do viruses travel at 50 miles per hour. Did these writers take any bio classes?

I liked Rick Schroder's performance but none of the rest did much for me. Benjamin Bratt was okay as the lead scientist but Eric McCormack, as muck-raking journalist Jack Nash never engaged my interest. I was expecting McCormack to be much better.

Comments

utenzi said…
Let's get this started: the bug is supposedly sulphur based, not carbon. No problem. However then to make more bug it would have to have a sulphur source. While there's plenty of sulphur around we don't have much within our bodies--so how was this bug amplifying itself?
2:15 PM
Unknown said…
I've seen some p-r-e-t-t-y fast viruses...
2:51 PM
Bobkat said…
Film makers tend to take a lot of liberties with science fact for the sake on entertainmnet. I think they assume that the majority of us are all too dumb to notice.
7:00 AM
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