Posted by
Catmman on Tuesday, May 27, 2008 3:19:41 PM
Take a bit of sci-fi legend, a great story, mix in a fair amount of BDS and Government (American Government) is evil, and...
BAMMO!
You've got
the 2008 A&E remake of the 1971 movie classic "The Andromeda Strain". (Both movies based on
the 1969 novel by Michael Crichton.) If you watched the first part of this mish-mash of bad remade goop that's two hours of your life you'll never get back again. Yes, it was that bad.
I really enjoyed
the 1971 movie. It was a bit slow, but the minutia of the original is what made it interesting. All the detail in entering the Wildfire Lab. The extended scenes of decontamination. The agonizing slowness with which the doctors and scientists had to react to an extra-terrestrial contagion with the technology of the time. Everything about the original movie was done well.
This remake is so full of politically correct crap and forumulaic Hollywood garbage the bloody alien contagion takes a back seat in the story! I kid you not. The reason for the movie takes a back seat to some kind of convoluted government conspiracy theory.
We have the intrepid reporter who is out to expose the fraud. We have the evil US government trying desperately to cover up something, though your not quite sure what really. You assume we (the US) wants to keep Andromeda for nefarious purposes. This is hinted at in the original movie, but it takes center stage in this incarnation.
Moral relativism abounds as well. The doctors wax philosophic about how Saddam Hussein didn't have WMD's unitl WE (the US) gave them to him. Also, another subplot which goes nowhere mentions how China had a biological weapons incident which killed several score of innocent Chinese civilians. But this is excused by the Chinese protagonist since WE (the US) was developing them too. The fact that WE weren't experimenting on our own citizens must have been left out of the script but I digress.
We have a PC and diverse cast - two females, one who is black. An Asian. A hispanic. A black four star general. We've got it all. All of the white males in the movie are portrayed as evil of course (or at the very least, callous) from the President of the US all the way down to the white doctor on the scientific team who, though he is supposed to be a doctor and research scientist, can't wait to nuke everything. I can just guess what his doctoral thesis was - "Nuke It!" That's pretty much all he says for the first hour and a half.
The
"Odd-Man Hypothesis", a fictional edict where a unmarried male is the go to guy for making command decisions concerning the detonation of the labs nuclear safeguard is apparently forgotten, as a female AF pilot is chosen to drop a tactical nuke an an American town - a situation where an unmarried male would most certainly be chosen by the military if the "Odd-man" was indeed taken seriously in this movie. Not to mention the crappy salute the female pilot gives her commander just prior to her mission. Why is it most actors can't render an even halfway decent salute? Why is it also that any actor portraying a military member who wears a beret wears that same beret like they were in Paris eating crepes under the Eiffel Tower?
It's a beret! Not a Chef's Hat! mon Dieu!
This movie is so full of it's own crap it defies common sense. A scene where an Army soldier becomes infected, goes on a rampage shooting several soldiers with an M-16. All of these soldiers are wearing full body armor and are mowed down while another soldier tries shooting the crazed soldier several times to no effect for several moments - his bullets not penetrating that same body armor. Another scene has a soldier driving a humvee through a military compound - his humvees coming under immediate fire by a dozen soldiers firing rifles, machine guns, etc. including an M2 .50 cal all to little effect on a not up-armored vehicle before some rounds finally penetrate the window glass. Yeah, the production values in this one are pretty lame.
And we have the "Star Trek" rip-offs as well. The doctors at the lab wearing "cards" which mimic the "communicators" of ST: TNG style. And there is an over reliance on "Computer." The doctors spend more time pontificating about politics and WMD than doing any actual work fighting "Amdromeda" with the "Computer" doing a majority of the research.
I hate remakes. They are almost universally bad. This one is no different. Hollywood just can't keep from injecting political correctness into everything, now including TV mini-series. My wife enjoyed the show and my daughters liked it too. My son, God bless him saw the same stuff I did and helped me enjoy the time making fun of all the plot holes and crap we saw. I'm surprised Ridley and Tony Scott allowed this to wear their names as producers.
I know I'm asking for trouble, but I will watch the next part tonight. Another review will follow tomorrow.