Soooo Andromeda StrainFollow

Nevermind. Dood just cut off his own head with a chainsaw. I'm in.

I recall liking the original version, but I saw it long ago.


This made-for-TV one...my roommate persuaded me to watch it with him, and I was sick anyway, so I gave it a shot. The first 1/2 was watchable, the last hour was absolutely horrible.

We recorded this and haven't seen it yet. Wondering whether we should just delete it without even trying to sit through both parts.

30 min left on the DL, I will let you know Pikko.

Usual made for TV fare. Usual contagious outbreak fare.

Some gore scenes, bad dead bodies, updates to include references of modern day stuff etc. It's not shakespeare but there weren't any parts that made you want to bludgeon the actors heads in with a blunt mallet. At least in the first half, but haven't watched the 2nd part but so far its pretty easy to tell how things will go down.

"meh" I went in with low expectations and it wasn't bad as I thought it would be but that by no means that it is good. Good way to kill a rainy afternoon off though.

Also keep in my mind this was based off of an old school book(1970ish), so it was pretty much the spring board for movies like 28 Days Later and what not (and as far as I know, that's wasn't a book. >.>... *checks* Okay, no doesn't look like it)

I don't remember the book that well since I read it for middle school, but it kept me wanting to read; moreover, if you keep that in mind, it's kind of hard to keep a middle schooler interested in a book for an extended period of time. So! I think that says something. XD Anyways, I just bought the movie the other night and haven't sat to watch it yet, but I will this weekend. :3 I'll put in a little review of my own when I see it. :D

Yup. Pretty much beat you over the head with social stuff that wasn't present in the original book. The whole vent mining thing. Invented in the new version. The "it's from the future!" bit? Added in the new version. Gay military officer? Added. Rogue military guys running around silencing media? Made up. Heck. There was no media involved in the original or the book. Military wanting to keep the strain for a bio weapon? Also added.

Other things were simply reversed, apparently just to make the government/military look worse to those viewing the new version.


Um... If you don't want any spoilers, don't read this. But hey! It's not like this is a Harry Potter book or anything, so I'm not going to blank it out. So deal with it...


1. In the original, the lead scientist was the one insisting that the contamination site be nuked (part of his own standard procedures for such an eventuality), while the government and military were hesitant to do so.

2. The loss of communication wasn't part of some ploy by the military, but a goof up. Part of the original theme of man relying too much on technology. They were receiving communications, but the bell that sounded to alert the communications officer was blocked by a bit of paper, so he didn't hear it. No one thought to actually physically check and see if a message had come through though (arrogance of the scientists being the theme here).

3. But because of this lucky happenstance, the scientists who originally ordered the nuking to occur didn't find out that the government had decided to contain the area instead, preventing the strain from mutating out of control. In the new version, the scientists protest the government/military wanting to nuke the area, manage to figure out that it's a bad idea and warn them, but then the strain mutates, somehow figures out what a nuclear weapon is, and attacks the jet after it's been called off, destroys it, and somehow re-arms the weapon so it detonates anyway. Yeah. Quite a stretch...

4. In the original, it was the scientists who had designed the protocols and conditions for Wildfire, and the government that was uncomfortable with some of the assumptions and procedures, not the other way around. Again. The nuclear detonation bit was reversed, both on the surface and at the base.

5. In the original, the epilepsy of one of the scientists (hidden by him/her) prevented them from figuring out how to destroy the strain until it was almost too late. In the new version, they removed this entirely, but had one of them be "light sensitive", so that when the lights and sirens went off from the seal breach, he went into a seizure and broke the self-destruct disarm panel (you'd think they'd make that a bit more study...).

6. In the original, the main antagonist was the scientists themselves and the facility they'd built. Not the government, or the military. This was the whole theme and point of the film. While the bit with the lasers was a bit silly in the original film, they hardly improved on it in the new version. Um... Not to be obvious, but you wouldn't store the irradiated (hot) water from a nuclear reactor in an open pool at the bottom of the central shaft of your facility, where all the ducts and pipes are. And certainly, if I were to need to fish someone out of said water and cut his thumb off for identification, I think I'd say pull him out (or at least his arm) rather then jumping into said highly radioactive water (this whole bit was silly beyond belief anyway, but whatever...).


7. Um. And on that note, the new one follows the theme of "blame the military at all costs" in yet another silly way. In the original, the "odd man" was just a scientist in the group. And he was the one who heroically managed to work his way up to the next level to shut off the self-destruct (and he only had 5 minutes to do it, not 15!). In the new version, he was a closeted gay military officer. And even his gayness could not prevent him from being "the man". So he had to die while trying to save the day (by falling into said water). Of course, the heroic lead scientist (who was supposed to be nuke happy, but in this version was nuke averse) continues on. But not before the light sensitive former Chinese bioweapons guy who'd mended his ways and defected to the US jumps into the water to retrieve the needed thumb. I guess we're supposed to learn that people can mend their ways and be heroes, but they have to die for their past sins anyway...



Yeah. Hit over the head with modern day stereotypes and political agenda about as hard as they could. Blatant really. Still, it was amusing to watch once...

The fact that the miniseries pissed gbaji off actually made it more enjoyable for me.

Let me clarify something, which may not be obvious to most of you (cause it's been awhile since I talked about Crichton):

I'm not a big fan of his books. Not because they aren't interesting and entertaining, but because the theme and plot of most of them are virtually identical. He's got an almost pathological distrust of science, and that's a rampant theme in his books. And many of them follow a variation of the following plotline:

Something happens. Either caused by a misuse of science and technology, or something that man thinks it can handle with science and technology.

A team of "experts" is assembled to deal with the problem at hand.

The team spends a significant amount of time mostly failing to solve the problem, and usually getting themselves into a bunch of near disaster situations along the way while attempting various solutions to the original problem.

In the end, the solution is pretty much to leave things alone. While the science may have helped them eventually figure it out, in pretty much every Crichton story, if the scientists had just done nothing at all, nothing really bad would have happened. The drama is the near disasters caused by their efforts, usually fueled by their own arrogance to think they can fix everything.


That's pretty much it. Sure. They can be engrossing reads. But after you've read about 3 of his books, you've pretty much read them all. There are a few exceptions, but certainly his most popular stories all follow that outline to some degree.


So. A version of one of his books in which it's not the scientists who are the bad guys who nearly get the world destroyed, but they are the good guys, while it's the government/military nearly wiping us all out, while not really much better, just kinda falls into the category of "different" to me.