Earths End Is Near Again: CrichtonS Brain Squad Is Back
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“The Andromeda Strain,†Michael Crichton’s 1969 novel, written while he was still a medical student at Harvard, is like one of the mutations the book painstakingly describes. It can shape-shift into a dozen metaphors. At the time of its publication it spoke not only to cold war fears but also to more up-to-the-minute notions that lunar missions might result in the importation of perilous contaminants from the Moon.
Since the 1980s “The Andromeda Strain†could be read as an AIDS or Ebola or bird-flu novel. In its most recent adaptation, as a four-hour mini-series beginning Monday night on A&E, it quakes with the noise of nearly every threat to our national well-being.
Less faithful to the original text than Robert Wise’s 1971 film, the current version, whose executive producers include Tony and Ridley Scott, retains the essential elements of the plot: a government satellite on an intergalactic germ-related fact-finding mission crashes into a small town out West, emitting a deadly pathogen that kills everyone nearby save for an unhealthy older man and a baby whose survival is an epidemiological mystery. The military is called in to contain the disaster, and a team of high-status scientific researchers is assembled to determine the capacities of whatever is causing this plague and thus forestall the end of civilization.
That the team’s leading genius, Dr. Jeremy Stone of the novel, is played here by Benjamin Bratt in a tight-fitting T-shirt, should immediately give us pause. He looks dressed for a weekend in South Beach, and amid the film’s urgent atmosphere, he adds all the tension of someone conducting a tax audit. Though he is sequestered in a clock-is-ticking bunker lab with his attentive colleagues, the script provides him with enough time to run on a treadmill and declare his passions to an attractive former research associate, one of the many other women who caused the dissolution of his marriage.
Why we are supplied these biographical details is unclear given that Stone doesn’t embody an interesting Crichtonesque paradox, the highly rational mind that makes poor moral choices. The film casts no judgments on his infidelity, portraying it as merely another aspect of his entitlement. His ex-wife at home is an irresponsible shrew.
The filmmakers have nobly sought to make the rest of Stone’s brain squad appear more contemporary, but the team winds up looking like the result of an unsubtle corporate diversity initiative. There is a black woman, an Asian-American man and a military doctor played by Ricky Schroder, who, against the backdrop of aggressive hypothesizing and discussions of acidic properties and wormholes and messenger theory and space-time continuum, reveals to a colleague the truths of his closeted dating life: “If you don’t ask, I won’t tell.â€
