First, the space crap - wormhole?! Time travel? ASCII-embedded challenge from the future? Sulfur-based crystalline network… Crap crap crap. Add in the entirely gratuitous evil government plot, right down to the bad-guys-get-shot-in-the-head-at-the-end-by-other-bad-guys.
I expect(ed) better from A&E, a long time ago. This pile of steaming feco-media is what I’ve come to expect from the charley-foxtrots at "Sci"Fi.
This stupid movie bore little resemblance to the book, with the exception of the superficial use of a few keywords: Andromeda, Project Scoop, Jeremy Stone, Wildfire. And in most of those cases, the elements were so badly distorted as to be unrecognizable.
Also, even if the Andromeda Strain ate hard radiation for lunch, there’s much more to nuclear weapons than gammas. I’d think that the plasma-inducing temperatures at ground zero would take care of anything made of matter, no matter how exotic.
I couldn’t figure out why the reporter was in the plot at all. Would it have made any difference to the plot if they had blown him away in the first half hour?
Well, presumably, they would have killed her husband and kids. But beyond that, how did she save a sample, and get it to the bad guys? Did they show us any way in which that could have happened? Didn’t she die when her suit fell apart? And if not, why not?
The producers seem to have stupidly conflated a nuclear reactor with a spent fuel storage and cooling tank. I’m no expert in nuclear matters (although I have participated in research on the history of the US nuclear program), but two bear almost no resemblance to each other. However, the image of something glowing in a deep tank of water (the cooling tank) is a common image from nuclear power plants. So I think we’re supposed to assume that the pool with the blue light thingies in it was an (uncontained) reactor. Idiotic.
A real expert on nuclear physics will be along to correct me if I’m wrong, but I think that if the radiation dosage in the pool was high enough to kill one person almost immediately, the dosage a few feet above it would have killed (or at least seriously sickened) Stone, pretty quickly, too. Water is a coolant, not a magical radiation barrier. (I think.)
The way things ended, I think the story is a “killing your grandfather” fallacy in which there is no source for Andromeda. The stuff was sent from our future by humans who wanted us to kill it because 2008 Earth still had the extremophile bacteria that would eat it, and the future Earth apparently didn’t. We did that, but we saved a sample on the space station, which becomes the source of the future infection. So we didn’t change the future, which is presumably wiped out by Andromeda. But where did it come from in the first place? Who knows?
In other words, the whole story line is a complete and utter mess.
They said the guy had a low pH but that couldn’t be a factor because the baby’s was normal. It was normal because it had stopped crying and screaming, but when it was in the town its pH was low too.
When the scientists (who comprised a very tiny team scrambled for such a major crisis – but that’s representative film characterization for you) were grasping that Andro “eats” radiation, I was thinking, “what type of radiation exactly? Alpha, beta, gamma, X-rays? How about visible light, infrared, UV?” Also microwaves, come to think of it.
Also, it’s not certain that destroying even all the known ocean-floor-vent microecosystems would eliminate a given organism exclusive to those systems, since we’ve done a better job studying our galaxy than we have mapping and exploring the mysteries of our planet’s oceans (or so I’ve read). I’m sure there’s many more oceanic vents than we’ve located, with some closing up and others forming all the time.
That’s what passing a single semester’s worth of college physics and biology does for you; they render ridiculous these straight-to-video-quality sci-fi flicks!
To give the audience an endless supply of lame jokes, apparently. And to emphasize the “men in black” conspiracy angle, I guess. And so he could run into the hot chick in the short shorts.
Nothing I can see as necessary. Somebody must have thought the original film was “too cerebral” or something, hence the need to drag in all this extra crap. In fact, I find the original better in several key ways, not least of which is the nuclear countdown thingy. Once the original crew discovered radiation + Andromeda = bad, they made a point of trying to get the nuclear fail-safe shut off, though it would take some time to arrange. Also, there were multiple shutoffs on each level (just not enough - the original describes how there were three per level, but then they discovered that five were really necessary, since the “Odd Man Out” might get caught in an area without a shut-off in the event of a breakout. The extra stations were on back-order), not just one delicate glass-coated station which was about as easy to smash as a eggshell. The communications breakdown in the original was a purely mechanical fault, not the absurdly counterproductive actions of shadowy evil conspiracy guys. Heck, one would think an actual equivalent of a Wildfire facility would demand constant access to on-line university libraries and research centers and whatnot. Information lockdown of any kind would defeat the purpose of the place.
And the preachy Greenpeace-ish crap about vent mining… gimme a break. It’s as contrived as some of the lamer Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes in which the solution to an alien society’s problem is the very thing they’ve made a conscious effort to destroy. It’s the televised equivalent of a big ol’ dose of cod liver oil.
All I can figure is that some studio exec decided early on that it HAD to be a two-night extravaganza and so they had to find something to fill out those four hours. Cut out the reporter and the men in black BS, it would only be one night and just a mediocre remake of the original. And far better than the dreck they served up.
Not that the cast is stellar, but I have seen each of them do some damn good acting. I kept waiting to see some last night.
My biggest pet peeve - hot shot future scientists create a wormhole, build their bucky-ball containment device (which seemed to do a piss-poor job of containment) with the secret message - and waste most of the message encoding a graphic that no one understands. How about “The f*cking virus was stashed on the ISS, then some idiot clerk mixed up the vial numbers and we unleashed the worst plague in recorded history. Please destroy the virus completely this time. Peace out. PS We had to strip mine the sea vents to get the exotic minerals to create the wormhole, ironic, aint it?”
The biggest laugh was how they were already offering the DVD for sale. I wonder how soon before they show up in a bin at Dollar General if they were stupid enough to pre-order copies.
lol its a Chriton story, the guy is up there for worst author ever to get published.
the best thing that could happen to any of his works is someone uses the name then completely changes 99% of the story.
Why all the hate around SDMB for Crichton? I’ve read Jurassic Park, Airframe, and maybe one or two more, and thought they were taut, engrossing, and well-researched novels. Not immortal classics, perhaps, but far from the worst I’ve ever read.
Watched the second part last night on DVR, and it was an unmitigated, vortex of suck IMO. Really really awful. The first part was ok, but rapidly went downhill.
The people from the future couldn’t have known that their wormhole-Bucky would down a satellite… because Andromeda apparently will evolve into a form that eats history books.
It just occurred to me, reading the (legitimate) griping here, why build a facility for a very small team of hand-picked, elite scientists, and then make sure that your emergency protocols are going to render one of them a convulsing hulk on the floor? I really wanted to like this show, but the plot holes - my conscious suspension of disbelief made an audible twang as it let go during the last two hours. (I think I said that about another movie recently; let me think - oh yeah, “28 Weeks Later”.)
Well, the thing that amused me about this and similar movies is why bother building a super-secure facility your genius scientists can’t break out of if they go zombie but there’s always a maintenance shaft the genius scientists will immediately break into so they can access whatever they want.
