And Crichton is credited as 'J. Michael Crichton' for some reason.

But the hack who dreamt up the whole WORMHOLE from the FUTURE twist deserves a special prize. that's super-fucking retarded even by the standards of recent shitty revamps.

BTW, the "autopsy" scene in the book is much more graphic, and the blood in the victims body clotted, not crystallized to a fine powder. I thought in this day of CSI gore all over the tv screen, this scene could have been more acurately presented. But, what the fuck does it matter...wormhole??..really?? Good thing Wise passed away, so he doesn't have to see what was done to his fine adaptation.

I saw the original "Andromeda Strain" years ago, and though I was marginally entertained by its germy claustrophia, I didn't think it was that great. It's a slow, plodding movie, the kind everyone says is "awesome" but no one ever wants to rent.

Boy, with the cast, budget, and directors available to the Scott brothers, I was expecting something tasty here. Hmm.

Though it was obviously going to be a dumbed-down version right from the stupid opening scene with screaming and death and melodrama (compared to the calm menace of the original), I did a big ::facepalm:: when Benjamin Bratt (at his blandest) looks into a camera for a retina scan, and we get an FX shot of the machine mapping his iris instead. If the guys responsible for this couldn't be bothered to get that simple thing right, it's too much to expect they would respect the audience's intelligence (all of the convincing scientific talk is taken word for word from the book and film; the rest is "OMG it's using crystalline resonance to communicate with its disparate parts!" style silliness straight out of a bad episode of ST:TNG). Burn the negatives!

For crying out loud, if you're going to say it's a probe that came through a wormhole and go that sci-fi route, then why not just go all-out and say the probe came through and was sent with the germ as part of an ATTACK, where Andromeda was MEANT to kill off the Earth's population? And then end the mini-series with other probes landing or whatever? I swear, this one plot point is so out there and so groan inducing that it turns this thing sour on the spot.

What stuns me is that the writer for this is Robert Schenkkan. Believe it or not, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and he wrote THE QUIET AMERICAN which was generally well-received for its script. I don't know if this wormhole fiasco is his idea or the Scott brothers (as producers) wanted it worked in...

...But whoever thought of this suckitude, here's all I can say: YOU STINK AS A WRITER. GET YOUR HANDS AWAY FROM YOUR KEYBOARD RIGHT NOW AND GO GET A REAL JOB!

http://preview.tinyurl.com/3qn r6j

Anyway, what a thin skinned bastard. Chrichton has always struck me as a lazy prose writer. That didn't bother me when I was in middle school but after a while I decided not to waste my time with his books. Even when I did read his stuff, he only had about a fifty percent batting average.

I think your memory may need refreshing. Stopping the bomb mattered because it would have fueled rampant mutation of the organism, resulting in many lethal strains. Figuring out the PH vulnerability allowed them to control the cloud of released bugs, using cloud seeding to wash them into the ocean to kill them.

Geekily yours, Mpb.

I must admit I had not anticipated "WORMHOLE! ...FROM! ...THE FUTURE!!!" levels of idiocy, but my expectations have not been disappointed.