Learning on ScreenThe Andromeda Strain
The Andromeda Strain. 2015. GB. DVD. Fabulous Films. 169 minutes + 41 minutes of extra. £29.99
About the reviewer: Dr Miles Booy was awarded his PhD by the University of East Anglia for his work on questions of authority in the representation of Christ in film. He is the author of Love and Monsters: The Doctor Who Experience, 1979 to the Present (IB Tauris, 2012) and his other publications include contributions to The Cult TV Book (2010).
Michael Crichton published his novel The Andromeda Strain in 1969. A film, produced and directed by Robert Wise, was released two years later. Crichton’s novel played to public and media worries during the Space Race, that returning spaceships or astronauts might bring with them plagues from space that were unknown on Earth. The film took the same tack. Ah, simpler, more innocent days. This version was shown in two 85-minute episodes on America’s Sci-Fi Channel in 2008. It features a couple of actors better known now than they were then (Benjamin Bratt, Daniel Dae Kim) and comes with a wealth of post-millennial concerns: military secrecy, government conspiracy, weaponisation of nature, Homeland security legislation. On top of this, there are a host of family issues for characters to contend with. Cramming all of this in – and the story is jammed with ideas, too much so to do any of them justice – means that the big set pieces of the original story are reduced to bit-part status.
The aborting of the nuclear attack on Andromeda, because the energy would feed it rather than sterilize it, is here, but even given the important structural point of a cliffhanger between the two parts, it fails to make great impact. Similarly, the climactic sequence, in which the biological scientists charged with finding a cure must fight past the defence systems of their own research complex, is drained of the thematic value which Wise gave it (in the film the building is metaphorically a body the systems of which are attempting to expel the human infection) and becomes just another race against time. Indeed ‘just another’ seems a suitable description of this mini-series which, while never bad, simply recalls too many other tales of human over-reach, man vs. nature and military-government cover-up. This review has contrasted this new version with Wise’s film, but really the mini-series has more in common with Outbreak (Wolfgang Peterson, 1995) or The Crazies (George A. Romero, 1973).
Spoiler alert: the big twist is that the virus isn’t alien in origin at all. It has been sent back through time by humans of the future who are, presumably, helpless in the face of its destructive powers. That’s less suicidal than it sounds. There is a cure available in the present that no longer exists in the future. It lies in natural resources which are still present on the planet now but which commercial exploitation will have destroyed by a later date. On top of everything else, this series has Star Trek IV (you know, the ones about the whales) somewhere deep in its DNA. The relevant cure resides in thermal undersea vents, but said vents are pumping out energy which advanced economies wish to harvest for industrial and private use. While governments line up on the side of exploitation, eco-warriors demand that the ocean environment be free of commercial exploitation. Harvesting the energy will destroy the bug which cures the disease. Watched today, you would have to try incredibly hard not to see in this a parable about fracking, but that reading would have been less common in 2008.
… watched today, you would have to try incredibly hard not to see in this a parable about fracking, but that reading would have been less common in 2008
This is not to say that Andromeda’s only value is as a catalogue of contemporary anxieties. There are many aesthetic touches. Regular cuts to the local wildlife demonstrate the passing of the infection through the local food chain. As the disease infects plantlife, it turns them scarlet and panoramas of Utah (though it’s really British Columbia, as usual) speedily reddening as the strain rapidly spreads are creepy and effective. If the series rarely rises above the level of competent genre work, it never falls below it either. My son, steeped in post-millennial disaster narrative but too young to know all the films that this series draws from, rips-off, homages or otherwise sits on top of, thought it was brilliant.
Dr Miles Booy
