The Andromeda Strain (2008)

The biggest problem with this movie is it’s a little better than you think it might be, which somehow makes it worse. As in, it takes itself a bit too seriously, which makes most of the movie feel kind of dull.

One of those movie experiences that is so good it makes you realize you've been grading everything else on a curve.

The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

Instead of rehashing how awful this movie was, let's name the cliché or plot hole that stood out the most for us.For me, it had to have been when Dr. Barton was in the containment room, panicking because she had been exposed to the virus, and she realizes that her hyperventilation has probably made her flushed with CO2 so she has not been infected. And just then, the good Dr. Noyce motherly chirps in with "You have to CALM DOWN!"Why? Was Dr Noyce trying to kill her or something? And for that matter...whatever happened to Dr. Barton? Like so many other characters...she just fell out of the plot after that.

Though I'd never seen the original or read the book I'd always been curious about this sci-fi classic.I found this version to be well-acted and full of suspense, but unclear and repetitious at times. (How many buzzard scenes did we really need to see?) And I didn't get at all why Mancheck and his crony were killed in the end, and by whom. (The president didn't seem swift enough to mastermind something like that.) And how was the Viola Davis character threatened? Most importantly, how and why was the lethal strain transmitted to earth in the first place? I liked the film for a few truly interesting scenes but more care should have been taken to clarify questions like these.Not at all bad but this could have been better.

When I first heard that A&E remade the sci-fi classic The Andromeda Strain as a four-hour miniseries, I immediately made it a high priority for this week's viewing. I read the book repeatedly as a boy, so much so that my father still jokes about it. The original movie followed the book rather closely, but it dragged; except for the first 20 minutes and the last 30, the pace could cure insomnia.After seeing part 1, I can say that the producers have cured that problem, but at the expense of making the story almost unrecognizable. As in the original, the plot involves a covert effort by the American government to find biological material in space that could be used as a weapon on earth, but unlike the original, we know that immediately. In attempting to cover that up, some members of the government try blaming the North Koreans for infecting the damaged satellite, even though as one character finally points out, why would Pyongyang spend all the money to send a biological weapon into space hoping an American satellite would come close enough to it to hit it and trust that said satellite would hit the US? The character who says that points out that Homeland Security can't be bothered to inspect most shipping, leaving that method wide open.And that brings us to some of the other updates. Everyone has personal problems in this remake; the Head Scientist has a bipolar wife, the Nosy Reporter has a cocaine addiction, three of the main characters have unresolved personal conflicts from the war. It's all very Lifetime Channel in that sense. Worse, though, are the little zingers that the writers of the remake put into the script about the current war and administration. When the Utah National Guard gets mobilized to quarantine the area, the Nosy Reporter tells his television audience that the UNG expects the call-up to be brief and says with a smirk, "Where have we heard that before?" One character postulates that the US supplied Saddam with all of his biological weapons, and so on. These pop up on a regular basis about every 20 minutes during the first installment.At the end of the first episode, the political correctness had pretty much run amuck, or so we thought. In the finale, we got even more than I thought could be crammed into a four-hour show. A crisis over "vent mining" on the ocean floor turns into a terrorist crisis, but that's not the end of that subplot. Two of the doctors fall in love when they're supposed to be saving the world. The one military doctor turns out to be gay, and since he's the key man, it gives him an opportunity to say, "It's ironic. The one person the military most fears turns out to be the one they trust to save the day." Even those of us who think don't-ask-don't-tell is hypocritical rolled their eyes at that development, which had nothing to do with anything else in the movie.But that's just the beginning of the stupidity. It turns out that Andromeda is a messenger from the nearby wormhole. The message? "Don't mess with vent mining". The entire infection comes from our future, where vent mining apparently turned out worse than what the hysterics fantasize about pumping oil out of ANWR. Humanity send Andromeda and its packing material back to the past as a message, based in binary code hidden deep within the molecular structure, to tell us to leave Mother Earth alone.Of course, no one bothers to ask why Future Earth does this in a way that would kill every living organism on Past Earth. No one in the script conference that created this bothered to ask why Future Earth wouldn't just send a metal plate through the wormhole that said, "HEY! STOP VENT MINING! LOVE, YOUR GRANDCHILDREN". Wouldn't that have been more effective and a lot less likely to, say, kill all of Future Earth's ancestors? Maybe we could send a message back that said, "HEY! WE'LL STOP VENT MINING WHEN YOU QUIT PLAYING WITH KILLER ORGANISMS! LOVE, GRANDMA AND GRANDPA". We can send that with some influenza as payback.The ending provides the biggest unintentional laughs. The military doctor has been designated the key man, the one who has to stop the self-destruct sequence of the laboratory that will provide unimaginable power to Andromeda for mutations. Unlike in the novel, he dies when he falls in the tunnel into a pool of water used by the nuclear reactor, just as he hands off the key that will stop the sequence to the project leader. Unfortunately, the key sequence requires the military doctor's thumb for identification, which leads another doctor to do a Mr. Spock (Wrath of Khan) and go into the water to cut off the thumb. He then throws the thumb straight up for two stories to the project leader who's hanging on the side of the wall, complete with a close-up, slo-mo sequence of the thumb tumbling towards the hero as the self-sacrificing doctor dies in a pool of water that wouldn't be radioactive anyway.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.What a shame. It could have been interesting; instead, it gives a peek into the mind of the politically-correct paranoids who produced this dreck.

After reading many reviews (about 100 of them) on this site, it seems like we have reached a consensus on this junky remake:1. Zero suspense 2. Rainbow cast 3. Ridiculous sub-plots 4. Nonsensical science 5. Shamefull ripoffI would agree with everything above. I too saw the original movie many years ago. It was masterfull in drawing you in to the confines of the plot. The suspense, the isolation, the last best hope of mankind to solve the riddle. Never once did my mind wander as to who theses "actors" were. They were so believable as Top scientists, you left the movie thinking they were real Doctors. The story did not require stupid lame subplots to fuel the movie, the main storyline was more than enough. The end result was a suspenseful, edge of your seat, clock ticking away type movie that left you exhausted at the conclusion, allowing yourself to finally swallow that lump in your throat that has been there the last hour. Bravo!Having said that, lets now examine the remake:This movie (if you can call it that) suffers from what most re-makes do. The times are changing. Gone are the thoughtfull, well made, movies that inspire viewers to use their imagination to think things out. Most movies today are about money, not about accomplishment. This crap is just another excuse to dip into that well of good movies to see if they can squeeze a few more dollars out of it. Instead of making a straight science-fiction movie, the producers no doubt formed a focus group of drunk and stoned college students to see what they want in a movie. Of course, Hollywood has to make sure it offends no one except white people, and of course make every opportunity to bash America. This movie succeeded very well on both counts. The result, more PC/anti-American garbage that plays well in foreign countries. Skip this junk unless you are the type that think SCI-FI original movies are good.