Toto Talks with the Cafe about Her Oz Memoriabilia.Victim: John Coldstream's New Book about the Landm.Miguel Rodriguez of Monster Island Resort Chats wi.All About Wuxia: An Interview with Sark on the Pop.Fighting Skeletons, Winged Harpies, and the Metall.Connie and Troy Find Love (Eventually) in "Susan S.Our Favorite Celebrity Autograph Collector Talks a.A Tribute to The Archers: A Powell & Pressberger M.In The Andromeda Strain, he takes a documentary-like, scientific drama and turns it into an exiting, time-driven mystery-that's no easy feat. I think that experience provided him with insight into the pacing of a film narrative. He spent the early 1940s as a editor, working on films such as The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Citizen Kane, and My Favorite Wife. He was equally at home with musicals ( The Sound of Music, West Side Story), horror ( The Body Snatcher), and psychological drama (The Haunting). In addition to updating the setting to the early 21st century, the miniseries makes a great many.
The miniseries is a 'reimagining' of the original novel rather than an adaptation. Surprisingly, Wise was not a science fiction specialist, though he also directed the splendid The Day the Earth Stood. The Andromeda Strain is a 2008 science fiction miniseries, based on the 1969 novel of the same name written by Michael Crichton about a team of scientists who investigate a deadly disease of extraterrestrial origin. It’s an obvious device now, but The Andromeda Strain may have been one of the first films to use it. I also admire how Wise uses scrolls at the bottom of the screen to convey the time and locale. Part of the appeal for me is that The Andromeda Strain includes one of my favorite plot devices: the forming of a team in which each member is introduced to the audience (I call this the Robin Hood theme since that’s the first film I can remember that used it). The second half of the film shifts the action to Wildfire, where the scientists turn detective and try to solve the mystery of why the old man and the baby survived.
As Hall cuts a vein on one of the corpses, powdered blood pours out-an indication of what Andromeda does to its victims. There’s a chilling scene in which Stone and Hall explore the ghost town of dead bodies.
The first half details the recovery of the satellite and the discovery of what it has done to Piedmont, New Mexico. One of my favorite scenes in the movie is a virtual tour of the five-level, underground facility as the team goes through decontamination and immunization procedures.ĭirector Robert Wise divides the film into two parts. You could say that there’s a fifth member of the team and that’s the Wildfire lab itself. The Wildfire team consists of: Jeremy Stone (Arthur Hill), the leader Ruth Levitt (Kate Reid), the cynic Mark Hall (James Olson), the passionate physician and Charlie Dutton (David Wayne), the skeptic who wonders if their goal should be destroying Andromeda. The scientists converge on Wildfire, a biological threat containment lab in Nevada, when a satellite returns to Earth with an unknown (alien?) organism. Its thrills come not from action sequences (though there’s doozy at the climax), but from the time-sensitive need to determine: What is the Andromeda Strain? How can it be destroyed? Why did a 69-year-old man and a six-month baby survive when Andromeda wiped out a New Mexico town of 68 people?
Its critics have labeled it slow-moving and overlong, but I find it intellectually exciting. See the original instead.This superior science fiction outing pits four dedicated scientists against a microscopic menace capable of destroying all life on Earth. It's not even bad enough to be good in a campy way. When the time comes for the big reveal (which I won't reveal here), instead of the insightful political message of the original, we get a sophomoric, pasted-on ending that doesn't relate to what's gone before and basically contains no message whatsoever, but does allow one last digital effect. It takes the tight script and edge-of-seat stress and paranoia of the original and substitutes digital effects, things blowing up, and absolutely nonsensical plot. The remake of The Andromeda Strain (2008) is also such a film. The remake of Lathe of Heaven (2002)was such a film. If there was a punchline to the original, the film will either ignore, misinterpret, or completely blow it. The writers appear to labor under the mistaken assumption that the viewer really doesn't need to be told a coherent story as long as there are a few visual elements from the original and some handsome-looking people emoting at each other. The cast and story elements are painfully politically correct. It's usually a made-for-TV movie, and it's usually an "updated" remake of an older movie.