Review – The Andromeda Strain (2008)

Michael Crichton’s germ paranoia classic gets dragged into the 21st century. In this remake the virus is smarter and everything else is dumber. The microbes kill everything in their path, and they have an incubation period of around five seconds. So a cadre of brilliant scientists – both aided and hindered by the Army – retire to a top-secret lab to concoct an antidote while an investigative journalist flounders around just enough to pad the plot to feature length (or to miniseries length if you’re watching the unedited version, which I didn’t). The production bets heavily on the power of the premise and a handful of wouldn’t-it-be-cool-if sequences, and as a result it comes up short. Of course it doesn’t help that the whole thing screams “made for TV.” See if desperate