I watched all four hours of the A&E remake of The Andromeda Strain last night. The original is clearly dated in terms of the technology, but it is a suspenseful film all the same and not really in need of a remake. However, this miniseries rendition wasn’t a terrible second attempt. The original will remain definitive, in part because it was more focused. To spread the story out to four hours, a lot of folderol had to be added, not always successfully. The overarching reason for the virus remains somewhat muddied, the encoded message was straight out of Contact and a lot of the technobabble was more babble than techno. I had to check my chemist brain at the door once they started futzing around at the molecular level, but I’m used to that.
The actors were all low key, including Benjamin Bratt and Ricky Schroeder and, in the case of Christa Miller (of Drew Carey and Scrubs fame), damned near comotose. Mood rings would be in no danger of changing colour around any of them. Andre Braugher chews up a few scenes, and Eric McCormack (Will from Will and Grace) wanders around the desert looking for a meaning for his character’s role, but the movie ultimately comes close to doing what the original did so well, which is to set various clocks running to ramp up the suspense. It wasn’t boring. I didn’t feel like I’d wasted four hours of my life.
Now that most TV shows are on hiatus for the summer and few of the summer seasons have started yet (Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Burn Notice, The Closers and Eureka are about all I’m looking forward to) I’m thinking about changing my writing schedule to evenings. Not sure how that’s going to work out, because I’m not always at my best then, but I’m going to give it a try. Tonight I’m going to tackle the novel manuscript in hardcopy for the first time.
