Posted by
Catmman on Wednesday, May 28, 2008 10:30:01 AM
I actually laughed more during this movie than the first episode. It was so full of politically correct pap and slaps at the military and the Bush administration the script must have been written by Daily Kos posters and the entire movie bankrolled by George Soros.
Let's see: We have reference to "illegal wiretaps", pontificating about terrorists at Gitmo; the Army doctor played by Ricky Shroder (the guy from the first episode who couldn't wait to nuke EVERYTHING) comes out as a closet homosexual being repressed by the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy; the current administration comes off as destroyers of Mother Earth with their continued want to mine deep sea vents; environmentalists attack and capture one of the new vent mining platforms out in the ocean decrying the rape of the planet (to which they suffer no consequences - the President doesn't order the platform recaptured since "enough people have died today");
BREATH...
The intrepid reporter is hunted by government types who look suspiciously like Blackwater operatives; "Andromeda" (the "virus"), it turns out, comes from our future - sent back by someone to warn us of our raping of the planet: You see the docs discover that Andromeda can only be killed by a specific bacteria which grow on those same undersea vents the evil President wants to mine. In the future this mining apparently destroyed the bacteria leaving Earth defenseless in the wake of Andromeda's later appearance at some point in the future. Of course the paradox plot holes abound at this point: If Andromeda was created at some point in the future and the future us's wanted to warn us of what we were doing and Andromeda's deadly consequences, then why not just send something else back to the past to warn of our future doom? And if the bacteria had been destroyed by mining, how did our future us's figure out that the same bacteria could destroy Andromeda? And the bacteria wasn't retrieved from the vents in present time anyway - it was collected at an earlier point, kept in a lab freezer somewhere. The Wildfire docs use this frozen bacteria (discovered well before any mining) to defeat Andromeda and use this same frozen bacteria to grow more cultures at Wildfire to ultimately defeat the Andromeda strain in the first place. The point the docs come up with about how the mining will destroy the bacteria is irrelevant since the bacteria was discovered, collected and frozen before any of the mining ever happened.
BREATH...
Then we have a mysterious Cigarette Smoking Man, a la X-Files (who chews nicotine gum until the end of the movie when he then lights up) running a massive government conspiracy to keep a sample of Andromeda for bio-weapon use - killing everyone who gets in the way, except the intrepid reporter and any of the scientists who know about the conspiracy and the players involved. Instead, the military brass are assassinated by a mysterious character. Even the family members who were kidnapped by this guy to force one of the Wildfire docs to give up a sample are apparently OK and not eliminated by the mysterious guy, even though they have seen his face, know who he is, and know the extent of his involvement in the conspiracy.
How about the plot hole for the doc at Wildfire who is exposed to Andromeda - it begins eating through her protective gear. The head doc comes to her rescue, but then has to leave to keep the lab from blowing up. We don't come back to the doc exposed to Andromeda until the end of the movie - how did she survive her exposure? What was done to keep the Andromeda released into the room she was in from escaping further in the lab complex? No resolution whatsoever. This movie is full of such garbage.
For a more detailed analysis (and a funnier one too),
go here. But just so you can get a flair for what some others say, take a look at this:
It provides a perfect analogy to the entire movie. The only way this mess should get a thumbs-up is if a reviewer cut one off in protest and threw it in the air. The rest of the ending is fairly anticlimactic, with a few assorted assassinations as everyone starts covering up the government’s role in the affair. Everyone’s loved ones suddenly finds themselves free of the personal problems that plagued them. The President declares that he’ll continue vent mining despite the strongly-worded memo from the future, which makes sense; I’d try to kill Future Earth too, after a stunt like Andromeda.
And this:
This remake is the usual Hollyweird treatment: Wretched politically correct excess piled on wretchedly politically correct excess, wholesale revision or replacement of the story with new material and characters not in the book, and endless, heavy-handed moralizing. The acting is poor, and the characters are not credible. It is, in a word, junk.
Indeed.
I'll end with the immortal words of Homer Simpson (paraphrased):
"Yeah Moe, that movie sure did suck last night. It just plain sucked. I've seen movies that suck before, but this was the suckiest piece of suck that ever sucked!"