The Andromeda Strain (2008)

"An attractive cast".

When SciFi Weekly used this phrase to describe the 2008 remake of The Andromeda Strain, I could feel the cold hand of foreboding resting lightly on my shoulder. Any time a television production pairs "attractive" with "cast" it invariably means something that looks like the image on the left; a load of pretty people with solemn expressions taking the place of real actors on a pseudo hi-tech set with odd lighting.

And that pretty much sums up the production that aired on A&E last Monday and Tuesday evening. It was originally supposed to be on the Sci Fi Channel, but the parent company noticed that some of the screen personalities had somewhat recognisable names and therefore deserved to air on a channel it was less likely to rub shoulders with repeats of Boa vs Python.



I had a difficult time coming up with a way to describe this remake of the 1971 Robert Wise film until I realised that this was not, in fact a remake of the The Andromeda Strain, but Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Or Alien. Or whatever other story revolves around a malignant life form invading an unwilling host and taking it over for its own disgusting purposes. In this case, The Andromeda Strain has been infested with a strange hybrid of The X Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Outbreak, and (God help us) Resident Evil.



Since this is 2008, it's a union rule that The Andromeda Strain must be "reimagined" and screenwriter Robert Schenkkan reimagines the hell out of it. All you have to do is look at the main cast (who will, against screaming protests, be referred to as an "ensemble") to see this. Where in the book the scientists were all middle-aged white men and in the film they were middle-aged white men and a middle-aged white woman, in 2008's version the producers used an "inclusive" criteria that reduces the cast members to ethnic representatives in a fashion that is at the same time so self-congratulatory and so cynically racist and sexist that it makes the bad old step-n-fetch days of Hollywood look like the height of enlightenment. Without exception the main cast is all young and attractive with a Germano-Peruvian Indian leading a black woman, a female doctor who is (another union rule) a hot babe, and a Chinaman late of the People's Republic who inexplicably speaks with a flawless American accent. Oh, and there is a white guy, but he turns out to be gay. To balance the latter out, he's also a US Army major, which means he's belligerent, racist and constantly advocating nuclear strikes, but who suffers a risible death at the hands of an unlikely atomic reactor. Nowadays this is what passes for imaginative.

The basic plot of the original book and film about a team of scientists in an underground laboratory studying an American satellite that returns to Earth with a deadly alien germ on board is kept, but Schenkkan seems almost embarrassed by his source material. Where Robert Wise focused on a taut, claustrophobic thriller/mystery about characters racing against time trying to understand an alien menace while cooped up in an antiseptic facility so artificial that even eating and sleeping are banished, the 2008 version looks and feels like every other sci fi offering on television since somebody thought that scientists only work in oddly furnished, windowless places underlit from entirely the wrong angles and populated with a highly improbable assortment of characters–in other words, Torchwood. The plot, as I said, is still there, but where Wise made the hunt for Andromeda (the code name of the germ) into almost a procedural that used the mechanics of science as a way to build dramatic tension, the 2008 version treats the science in an offhand way–except when it gives an opportunity for pointless slow motion shots of someone walking through bubbly liquid. Where in 1971 we'd see the intricacies of testing for amino acids or preparing blood samples, 2008 has people walking in and casually mentioning that the germ has no DNA as if they were commenting on the weather.

This is surprising, given that the 2008 version runs at almost twice the length of the original, but maybe they needed more time for the pointless soap opera plots about Bill Clinton reborn several stone lighter and without the sleaze, divorces, estranged teenagers and laboratory romances that would only be realistic if the super secret laboratory in the midst of a crisis was run along the lines of a television production company office. Or maybe it had to do with the ramped up violence and horror as the disease spreads with a virulence and pure bloodymindedness that made me wonder why they didn't just go whole hog and have the übervirus bring the victims back as zombies and be done with it. Then at least we could have had Milla Jovovich blazing away with an Uzi in each fist. The horrible thing is, this would have been an improvement. As it is, we have to make do with dream sequences and double-talk about buckyballs and wormholes.

Don't even get me started on the time travel rubbish that makes the current series of Doctor Who look like Out of the Unknown.

Some of the violence is downright disturbing, though not in the way that director Mikael Salomon intended. The grisliest ends in the film are reserved for women with one committing self-immolation and a (union rule) female fighter pilot trapped screaming in the cockpit of a crashing F-16. These are depicted with such loving detail that one wonders if the director doesn't have certain... issues.

Writer Schenkkan justifies all this because "If you're going to update the story, which is our mandate, you have an obligation to reflect the world as it is."

That's updating as in ignoring the fact that the United States gave up bioweapons development forty years ago. And it reflects a world "as it is" where there are no straight white men–at least, none that aren't in the pay of the Military Industrial Complex or a coke-addicted journalist who wants to both Woodward and Bernstein who is caught in the web of a hideous conspiracy perpetrated by an American government run along the lines of the Cosa Nostra.

The latter is part of the "updating" that Schenkkan grasps so tightly to his chest. Wise's 1971 approach to the story is far too old fashioned, so Schenkkan updates it with a paranoid storyline about an evil government bent on evil conspiracies, which is far more modern.

If you define "modern" as 1967.