The Andromeda Strain – DVD Review

Back in the early ’90s when I was in junior high, a little movie called Jurassic Park came out that was like nothing I had ever seen. Everyone was reading the book, too. A book by a guy named Michael Crichton. I had never heard of him, but was so impressed with the movie and the concepts that I immediately picked up a copy and got to reading. I was hooked. Within the next year, I read everything that Michael Crichton had ever written (a feat for a junior high schooler who also had to read a bunch for book reports and such), including a very intriguing book called The Andromeda Strain. When I saw the trailers for the A&E miniseries, I was so excited. There’s so much they could do with this! The movie couldn’t possibly go wrong!

Sadly, I was the one who was wrong.

A stray satellite falls to Earth and skids across the Arizona desert where it is discovered by a teenage couple doing some not so innocent things in the back of a pickup truck. They load it into the bed and haul it into town, nearby Piedmont, Arizona. Within the next 24 hours, the entire population of the town is dead, save a drug addicted old man and a colicky infant. The military calls in the Wildfire team to investigate and they discover that this bacteria that was on the satellite, nicknamed The Andromeda Strain, is sulfur based and is virtually unstoppable. They try to discover ways to kill it and, for the majority of the film, fail in their attempts. When they do figure it out (of course they figure it out!), the climactic “killing of the virus” is just plain silly to watch. That about covers the plot of the film. The entire three hours of the film.

All of Michael Crichton’s books are interesting, but all of them suffer from the same plague: all the medical and scientific jargon in the middle. The other movie adaptations of his novels have done a pretty good job either summarizing or leaving out most of this for the benefit of the audience members. This one? Nope, not a chance. It leaves it all in. Had this been a feature film and only about an hour and a half to two hours long, that probably wouldn’t have been a problem. But when they draw it out over two nights (I really felt sorry for the people who watched this on A&E) and it was over three hours long, it got very redundant and quite boring.

One of the complaints that I usually have about mini-series in general is that they usually introduce way too many characters and have too much going on. This is not an exception. We’re carted back and forth between the scientists working on the Andromeda Strain and their families back home, the President of the United States and his family and associates, and an a-hole journalist in the form of Eric McCormack who witnesses a terrorist act on a military base and escapes from being killed by the military with a pot-smoking cowboy-hat-wearing chick. There’s simply too much going on for anything to be developed. It comes off as overload. Especially since ALL of these characters are introduced within the first 19 minutes of the mini-series!

The actors are all recognizable: Benjamin Bratt (Law & Order, Miss Congeniality), Eric McCormack (Will & Grace), Christa Miller (Scrubs), Andre Braugher (Salem’s Lot, The Mist), Ricky Schroder (Silver Spoons, NYPD Blue), and have all done well in the past. Could their wooden performances possibly be attributed to director Mikael Saloman? He has directed Hard Rain, after all, but he’s got some good ones in his resume too. Maybe this was just a miss on his part. Heck, this film was a miss all around. The wooden performances could also possibly be because of the terribly weak script. Just like Tara Reid trying to pass herself off as a scientist in Alone in the Dark, nobody in this film is convincing as a scientist.

And another thing. For those of you who have seen the most recent M. Night Shyamalan film The Happening and The Day After Tomorrow, you know that the characters in the film outrun an unseen force. In The Happening, it’s the wind. In The Day After Tomorrow, it’s the cold. In The Andromeda Strain, it’s an airborne virus. At the end of the film, someone on the production team thought it would be a good idea to give the virus a red color, so it looks like blood as it spreads across the countryside. I couldn’t make this up! The AIRBORNE VIRUS is visible and the characters try to run from it.

The Andromeda Strain had so much potential. It could have been great! But a weak script, a long running time, bad performances, and some really stupid effects make this film a real stinker. Somehow, this mini-series garnered some of the highest viewing numbers in A&E history. I feel so sorry for those people.

The DVD is presented in Dolby Digital Sound and in widescreen with a 1.77:1 aspect ratio. Hey, at least it’s not full screen to maintain the original form.

The cover of the DVD boasts “4 HOURS OF BONUS MATERIAL!”, but one has to remember that the feature commentary (by director Mikael Saloman, executive producers David W. Zucker and Tom Thayer and editor Scott Vickrey) is approximately 3 hours by itself.
Other than some pathetic visual effects breakdowns, and a photo & design gallery, the only other feature is called Terra Incognita: Making the Andromeda Strain. The making of is just as bloated and uninteresting as the film itself.

Previews include: Battlestar Galactica, The Incredible Hulk (the old TV show), Sci-Fi channel series Eureka, and Doomsday.

The Andromeda Strain is the worst movie I’ve seen all year, hands down. I wouldn’t recommend this to my worst enemy. Not even those of you who love to watch movies that people say are bad because of your curiosity. I am one of those people and I’m saying this one just isn’t worth it.

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Universal Studios presents The Andromeda Strain. Directed by Mikael Saloman. Starring Benjamin Bratt, Andre Braugher, Ricky Shroder. Running time: 177 minutes. Rated NR. Released on DVD: June 3, 2008. Available at Amazon.com.