The Andromeda Strain miniseries, AE, May 26, 2008.
Michael Crichton's notorious novel 'The Andromeda
Strain' was made into a thriller by Universal Pictures with Robert Wise as the
director in 1971, and on May 26 and 27, A&E Cable is airing a remake (also
from Universal), updated to the modern concerns about bioterror and North
Korea. The miniseries is directed by Mikael Salomon.
The setup is well known. A domestic space satellite
crashes in the west, a civilian couple picks it up, and takes it to a small
town, where everybody dies, except a baby and an old wino. As in '28 Days
Later' the people sometimes become maniacal first. But here the virus may have
come from outer space. Vultures hover over the town in
early foreshadowing, and then they die, too.
A crypto secret Delta force of volunteer scientists is
dispatched to a top secret underground laboratory
called Project Wildfire. In both films the scientists undergo interesting
decontamination; in the 1971 film there is a photoflash chamber that burns and
depilates the entire body (perhaps predicting infection control procedures for
surgeons some day); later there is 'body analysis.'
[I note with some amusement that one of the sponsors was Gillette, with a cute
commercial of a guy using the "Body Wash"; the commercial was
replayed numerous times.] There are debates as to whether to nuke the small
town, and the Project Wildfire has a self-destruct capability. The project team
intentionally is staffed with at least one unmarried man, on the theory that an
unmarried man is more likely to obey an order to self-destruct 'for the good of
society'.
Jack Nash plays Eric McCormack, a somewhat rogue
reporter, suspended for alcohol problems, who gets his job back by convincing
the boss that he knows about 'Project Scoop.' Pretty soon the chief scientist
Jeremy Stone (Benjamin Bratt) is communicating with him to find out what
they're in for. The find out that the bug has no DNA and may consist of
wormholes inside buckeyballs (fullerenes), an idea
explored in James Rollins's novel 'Sandstorm.' They learn that nuking Andromeda
would only make it spread.
In fact, the actual chemistry of fullerenes is much
more down to earth than science fiction makes of it, but the idea that an
unusual molecule or even an unusual isotope of an atom could encapsulate a wormhole or some transformative potential certainly can
generate storylines and plots.
For example, in one of my manuscripts, I postulate
than certain viruses could carry unusual radioactive atoms that generate micro
black holes that are used to exchange absorb identities of people. One can
learn what it is like to "become" someone else, someone who is a
cultural patriarch, who suddenly learns to live with "your" karma. In
Crichton, Andromeda carries information in the arrangement of potassium and
rubidium atoms. The scientists finally wonder if it comes from the future (like
"The 4400") and creates a paradox by trying to destroy the past, or
if the virus is an engine for instantaneous communication across the universe
with wormholes. Ironically, the "antidote" seems to be an unusual
extremophile bacterium near a heat vent in the deep ocean, which environmental
activists are demonstrating to protect (from "undersea stripmining").
The construction of a subplot involving the rogue
reporter (Nash) doing his own "investigations" and essentially
getting kidnapped by the government (with all its Patriot Act powers) and then
escaping in the disaster, is interesting. One is reminded of the reporter in
Sydney Pollock's "Absence of Malice" perhaps. In one of my scripts, I
have a young male reporter, engaged but ambiguous in his sexuality, who goes on
a supernatural quest to find out who he is, encounters like-minded people, and
is drawn into a bizarre initiation that would finally identify "the
UFOs" and lead to a worldwide cataclysm.
The script mentions other rogue experiments that bring
the story up to date, such as one with smallpox. It also points to the politics
of stopping nuclear proliferation, a transparent commentary on the difficulty
of containing the downstream risk of nuclear terrorism as often written about
by Graham Allison. The fact that vultures and other predatory birds carry the
"strain" provides an obvious metaphor or the risk of an avian
influenza pandemic.
The writing style of the miniseries resembles the Fox
series '24'.
Video below: The epilation scene from the 1971 film. Pure shame.
This scene is in the book. It reminds me of 'The 40-year-old Virgin'.