Copyright © 2008 by Sarah Stegall
The Andromeda Strain
A&E, Monday and Tuesday, 26 and 27 May 2008, 9 PM
Written by Robert Schenkkan
Directed by Mikael Salomon
Warning: this review contains some spoilers of the new mini-series, the 1971 movie, and the original novel, all of the same title. If you’d rather not know the story, bookmark this page, and then read it after seeing or reading the original.
The 1971 movie made from Michael Crichton’s novel, The Andromeda Strain, bore all the hallmarks of late Golden Age sci-fi: it was long on technology and science, short on characterization, and reflected Cold War paranoia in a big way. Huge, plastic installations that looked like computer clean rooms housed gleaming machinery; the human beings trapped in the Wildfire complex resembled nothing so much as their own lab rats. Actors earnestly recited scientific information at one another with all the seriousness of a Pentagon briefing; what little humor there was, was mild and sardonic. Most of all, despite being filmed at the end of the Sixties and the Vietnam War, only a couple of years after men first walked on the Moon, it was steeped in an attitude of trust towards the government. The prevailing message was “We don’t know what’s Out There, but if it’s nasty, the Government will protect us.”
What a difference thirty-six years makes.
A&E’s re-make of the Crichton classic is also a re-visioning, a re-assessment not just of what we know of the world but how we view it and our place in it. Where the first version showed Big Science and Big Government working hand in hand, thwarted only by nature and accident, the post-Watergate, post-9/11 world of 2008 is reflected very differently in this version. Produced by the Scott brothers, Ridley (Alien, Blade Runner) and Tony (The Hunger), the design of the show contributes to the updated feel: this looked like The X-Files meets The Hot Zone. Not too surprising, in light of the fact that cinematographer Jon Joffin was DP for The X-Files during its haunting fourth season. Much of the paranoia that imbued The X-Files seeps into this version of The Andromeda Strain. And like The X-Files, that paranoia is justified. There are kidnappings, blackmailings, assassinations, plots within plots, all carried out by faceless men in uniform at the direction of shadowy government puppet masters. In the end, the team itself is not immune to betrayal from within.
Like the novel and the 1971 movie, The Andromeda Strain opens with the cataclysmic arrival of a satellite, which crashes to Earth as a meteor. A couple of teenagers throw it onto the back of their pickup and drive it into the nearby town of Piedmont (and I wonder if I was the only viewer flashing back to the opening scenes of The Blob at this point). Shortly thereafter, an Army team sent to recover the satellite track it to the town, but when they arrive they find everyone dead, except for one man frantically yelling at them. They have no time to respond, because in seconds they too are dead.
This incident triggers a “Wildfire” event, a top-secret government plan that centers on the Wildfire facility, a bio-containment and research facility located apparently in the same place they hide Dick Cheney during Orange level terrorist alerts. General Manchek (Andre Braugher, Homicide: Life on the Street) rounds up a politically correct yet statistically improbable team of the most diverse group of scientists ever to set hand in glovebox. Jeremy Stone (Benjamin Bratt, E-Ring) is the erstwhile leader, and I give him props for dumping more information in four hours than my high school science teacher did in a year, and doing it believably. This is in contrast to the 1971 incarnation of Jeremy Stone, the late Arthur Hill, who droned on with the wooden delivery of an ossified Ivy League professor.
Daniel Dae Kim (Lost) plays the Chinese immigrant Dr. Chou; Viola Davis (Law and Order: SVU) plays biologist Dr. Charlene Barton; Christa Miller (Scrubs) is the surgeon and mother-figure/love-interest; and Rick Schroder (24) rounds out the cast as the erstwhile rival of Dr. Stone, Major Bill Keane. They are joined by a character new to the story, reporter Jack Nash (Eric McCormack, Will & Grace), whose attempts to get the story out are thwarted by all the machinery an out-of-control government can throw in his path. The snappier delivery of extremely complex yet fascinating biological detail was beautifully handled by all of these actors.
The team visits the town of the dead and finds evidence that the “virus” not only kills within seconds of exposure, but also causes psychotic breaks in its victims, leading them to acts of homicide and suicide. Two living survivors are recovered—the town drunk and a crying baby. Everyone is returned to Wildfire and sealed in, and we are treated to some slow-motion sequences of the team going through decontamination the way a Mercedes goes through a carwash. General Manchek informs the President.
The President, played by Ted Whittall (The L Word) with an accent midway between Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, has other things on his mind. Not only is he campaigning for re-election, but his attempts to initiate thermal-vent drilling on the ocean floors are being thwarted by environmentalists. This is another example of the updating of this story: in 1971, the thermal vents on the ocean floor had not yet been discovered (they would be, in the East Pacific Rise, in 1977). The current research into the communities of chemosynthetic organisms is among the (ahem) hottest topics in ocean research today. More cutting edge science is threaded throughout this updated version: buckyballs, Archaea, DNA research, wormhole theory, messenger theory. We discover after a couple of hours that the Andromeda strain was picked up by a secret research mission to a secret wormhole that has since collapsed. Best of all, nobody stops to explain all this stuff. While it may leave some viewers in the dust, this is the best integration of actual science into a science fiction story I’ve seen in a long time. Apart from the wormhole itself (which is still part of respectable physical speculation), there is no hand-waving, no “Trek science” to insult the knowledgeable viewer. The science is real, and that makes the supposed threat more real.
But if the show triumphs in its depiction of the science, it fails miserably on some of the visuals associated with Andromeda. When an aborted nuclear strike actually lands home, the Andromeda strain is dispersed across the countryside, mutating and growing as it progresses. To show this, the filmmakers colored vast swatches of countryside in orange, then when the strain is killed at the end of the movie, those orange patches are instantly restored to green. It looks so fake it would have been better not to show it at all. Granted, it’s a challenge to show a biological contamination at the cellular level spreading across the countryside, but painting the landscape doesn’t come close.
With the contagion spreading, and various government coverups being uncovered right and left, Stone’s team works at finding some way to kill Andromeda. They gradually realize that it is not one organism, but several which have been separated, as if kidneys and livers were invading our world. Further, the samples in the lab actually seem to be communicating with one another to fight back against attempts to kill them. Dr. Chou’s analysis of the satellite has revealed a black substance that was apparently some kind of container for Andromeda, and in a brilliant sequence, he decodes a secret message encoded in the actual molecules of the substance. It turns out, Andromeda was sent through the wormhole from our own future, in an attempt to a) wipe us out and b) warn us. Gotta give those future scientists props for finding a way to get our attention. Conveniently, the decoded message mentions, among other cryptic clues, a bacterium found only in thermal vents. The team theorizes that thermal vent mining has destroyed this bacterium, leaving their future colleagues helpless against the invading Andromeda. Tests quickly prove that the bacterium eats Andromeda like candy, and the team begins to grow vast amounts of it for an attack on the invader.
The secondary story, of Jack Nash the reporter, sort of peters out at this point. Although he has heroically narrow escapes from assorted assassins, by the time he is actually able to deliver his warning, the attack on Andromeda is underway and is successful. He’s in the position of the runner who arrives to inform the king of an attack, just as the king is winding up the battle. It’s too bad, because McCormack’s portrayal was very enjoyable—angry, obssessed, funny, and self-deprecating. He showed admirable range in his portrayal; he just didn’t have anywhere to go with it.
The last half hour repeats the tense sequence at the end of the 1971 movie, with a hero (this time Dr. Stone) racing to turn off the self-destruct sequence accidentally triggered in the lab. This time, instead of climbing through implausibly clean, well-lit maintenance tunnels conveniently provided with ladders, he has to scramble through dangling cables, tightly packed vents, and up slippery pipes. This darker version of the story also kills off two team members in suitably heroic modes, leaving us with three survivors now considerably more cynical about their government than before. The final sequences kill off two of the more sinister villains, without revealing who is really pulling the strings behind the scenes. I was forcibly reminded of Chris Carter and his plots within plots. In the end, the final vial of Andromeda, like the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark, is neatly filed away in a huge government warehouse—this time, in a biocontainment ship orbiting in space. The number on its case is the same as the mysterious, undeciphered number in the Andromeda code.
Parts of this script, notably the new science, were superbly integrated: the discovery that Andromeda is sulfur-based seems like a throwaway discovery, until the vent bacillus turns out to be sulfur based as well, feeding on sulfur. The use of buckyballs as building blocks for the Andromeda container not only clued us in from the beginning that this was not Earth technology, but also paved the way for the later discovery that the container itself contained a molecular-level ASCII code. Other parts of the story didn’t mesh so well—there really was no reason for General Manchek to withhold from the isolated team the information that Andromeda was part of a research project. Manchek trots out that tired old bromide no one believes any more: “People would panic!” People are more likely to just change channels. Other parts of this show, particularly the final scene, lead me to believe that this two-part miniseries was intended as a series pilot. I would not be at all surprised to see someone roll out a short lived SF series based on this pilot.
This version of The Andromeda Strain carries with it all the tropes of modern, post-New Wave science fiction: a greater emphasis on character and human interaction, skepticism about Big Science and Big Government, concern for environmental and ecological issues, and most of all, a loud emphasis on politics. Indeed, the ecological issues can hardly be avoided: there are more “messages” in this story than on a teenager’s iPhone. There’s the political message: our soldiers/National Guard are inadequate to the task because they’re stretched too thin thanks to the Iraq War. The attacks on the Bush administration in particular are relentless: the Homeland Security Act and the USA PATRIOT Act are vilified (and rightly so) at every opportunity. Eric McCormack is at his best when he defies a corrupt Colonel Ferrus, who threatens him with the kind of treatment the Fourth Amendment no longer protects us from: incarceration without legal representation, revocation of habeus corpus, the whole disappearing act. At the same time, radical environmentalists who take over a vent mining rig are justified in the final act when it is discovered that they are protecting the only thing that can save us from Andromeda.
On top of all these messages, this version still hammers home the idea that Michael Crichton has been shouting, with increasing volume, over most of his career: we need to be very, very careful when we interfere with ecological systems. Just as his Malcolm told us in Jurassic Park that just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should, just as his entire jeremiad in Next tells us, we are meddling with ancient systems we do not understand, and our arrogance and greed will get us killed. Through all the lies, counterplots, and intricate encodings of The Andromeda Strain, that much is clear.