The Andromeda Strain

Two teenagers happily making out in the back of a pick-up truck get the surprise of their life when a satellite crashes near them. They bring their find back home to the small town of Piedmont, Utah and open it up. Unfortunately for everyone, there is a very deadly virus that kills off every person but two in the town.  The US military assemble the Wildfire team together, the best and the brightest scientists and doctors lead by Dr. Jeremy Stone (Benjamin Bratt). They are quarantined off from the rest of the world in a completely self-sufficient lab where the satellite is brought as are the two survivors.  

As they are desperately trying to find out what exactly Andromeda is and how to stop it, it starts to spread outside the quarantine zone,  causing people to die outright or to go crazy and kill people. It also jumps back and forth between human and animals and even plants (it might have even been airborne at one point during the film). After many debates, Stone has an explanation that no one really likes, but it is the only one that can explain everything. Andromeda is not alien, it is actually from Earth, just in the future. Future Earth has sent it back in a container that has the explanation imbedded into it genetic make up.

According to Stone, they sent it to us because it most probably killed off most of the population in the future, and there is something in this timeline that may be able to stop it.  And there is. It is a micro organism that lives on the bottom of the ocean, near thermal vents that eats sulfur. Since Andromeda is sulfur based it, in theory it will eat Andromeda. The only problem is that the US President is pushing forward ocean mining that will destroy this organism, which explains why it was sent back in the past.

Anyway, after a bunch of scares, they eventually kill off Andromeda, or so they think. 'Project Scoop' is a project started by the US Government where lethal viruses and the such are put in a lab in space. We see at the end of the film that Andromeda is still hanging around out there. Also the Pres. continues to push forward with the ocean mining project, which just goes to show that men are stupid. There was just a crisis that could have wiped out the entire world, but as long as it was adverted and there's money to be made, who cares?

There was actually a few more plot lines in this film that just bored the hell out of me and really had no point in the story, so I didn't bother mentioning them. There was one involving Jack Nash (Eric McCormack), that really didn't push the plot forwards in any way. He just gave info to Stone that Stone already sort of knew. There was one involving Stone's family that went nowhere, there was one involving the President and the Activists that did nothing but to inform us about the dangers of ocean mining. Was the activists taking over a mining platform really integral to the plot? No. The list goes on. Blah blah blah. It's too bad though because the science part of the plot was all very interesting, it could have done with a few less conspiracies, though. And a few less scenes of watching animals dying. There was a dog that gets killed and a rat that gets eaten by a snake that gets eaten by a bird, then a whole lot of birds die. It was a little weird.   

The acting wasn't that bad, it wasn't that great either and the script was pretty bad. I expected more form the special effects, however. The scene where Andromeda was sweeping though a field and all the plants were changing colour was very odd.

But what gets me the most the worst part of the film was the final 'dramatic' scene, right after Andromeda got out in the lab and the self-destruct was initiated. First of all, the self-destruct was turned on at the beginning of the movie to show how it works and that Maj. Bill Keane (Rick Schroder) was the only one who can stop it once it was activated.  All of a sudden when it was activated a second time there were flashing lights everywhere and since Dr. Tsi Chou (Daniel Dae Kim) conveniently forgot to mention that he was epileptic, he has a seizure and knocks out the control panel. That forces Keane and Stone to travel up the central chute to the floor above them, but the chute is disintegrating! What? How the hell is it falling apart? Why is it falling apart? How badly was this lab built that as soon as the self-destruct is initiated that it starts to fall to pieces?   It makes no sense! And that was supposed to be the big ending? It wasn't. It was a crappy ending to a crappy movie.

Grade: 3.5/10