http://www.salon.com/ent/tv/iltw/2008/0 ... nt/tv/iltw


Apocalyptic whore monger
You know who the real hero to whores around the globe is, though? Michael Crichton. Here's a man who could've taken his great big brain and his M.D. from Harvard and used it to find a cure for cancer. But what did he do? He wrote books about secret islands filled with scary dinosaurs, and then brought us "ER," the undead hospital drama that stumbles through season after season like a zombie, refusing to die.

Michael Crichton applied his perfectly good brain and fine education to scaring the living daylights out of mankind with nightmarish endgame scenarios, and for that, we'll be eternally grateful henceforth. But was that enough? No. Crichton not only creates living-dead hospital soaps and dinosaur-island sequels that force poor Jeff Goldblum to phone it in on an international stage, but he resurrects his own long-dead endgame scenario for the second-rung cable channel movie market. This man is a true survivor!

Thus do we find ourselves staring down the barrel of "The Andromeda Strain" (9 p.m. EDT Monday, May 26, on A&E), the sophisticated, haunting, computer-enhanced, chewily apocalyptic remake of the tale that first graced movie theaters way back in 1971. Oh, but these days, "The Andromeda Strain" can feature scenes where Benjamin Bratt says things like, "Take a look at the Fourier electron density scans," and an enormous transparent screen appears with beautiful graphics on it, and we can all marvel at the big, pretty plasma home-entertainment device of the future. Homeland Security can play a prominent role, the president can have a half-Bush, half-Clinton drawl, Eric McCormack (Will from "Will & Grace") can play a macho, rough-and-tumble reporter, Rick(y) Schroder can reprise his role from "24" with stunningly little conviction, and most important, random people of all stripes can die gruesome, horrifying deaths as we watch in horror. It's just like "24," in fact, except with 10 times more horror and dying, plus double the pseudo-scientific rambling.

All of which might sound pretty great, but it's not. Half of the two-night movie is spent with the scientists in the underground bunker, scientists dressed like "Star Trek" crew members who pace and tell the computer to do things and then have terse but shallow conversations about Lorentzian and Euclidean worm holes, advances in nanotechnology, futuristic bioweaponry, unfamiliar cellular structures and other far-out scientific topics that easily could've been written by a stoned teenager who stayed up all night reading Wikipedia.

The rest of the movie features the go-to moments of every suspense-thriller flick from the late '80s/early '90s. The president is freaking out, the generals are trying to hide a top-secret initiative, the scientists in the bunker are alternately theorizing and falling in love -- there's even an innocent little baby in a bubble to keep everyone honest.

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Well, there have been a couple of flipper babies...yeah.

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Reading:

The Spartacus War - Barry Strauss
Slow Death - Jim Fielder
The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire - Edward Gibbon

Me too.

Tt

I probabley won't go see this one. I generally don't like apocolyptic story lines. I just don't find them interesting. That's why I don't watch zombie movies (or read the books either).

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http://vintagehorror.com/home/author/matt