Disclosure (1994)

Saturday is "Take Out the Trash" Day.

Disclosure (Barry Levinson, 1994) Handsome, but su-leeeeeeazy mounting of the Michael Crichton story about sexual politics in the work-place. With Michael Douglas heading the cast, the film could be confused for Fatal Attraction II, and one wonders just how far the makers were going for that, what with Douglas top-lining ...Attraction and Basic Instinct and Demi Moore, late of Indecent Proposal. Unfortunately, where those films whetted the national apetite for dangerous sex-capades, Crichton's cold-shower-of-an-idea seems tame.

At a cutting-edge Seattle software firm* experimenting in virtual reality, Tom Sanders (Douglas) thinks he's getting a promotion from his slick-as-shit boss (Donald Sutherland). He gets passed-over for Meredith Johnson (Demi Moore, all power-suit, push-up bra and stiletto heels), who's robotically quick with company-approved schpiel, with just a bit of predator to her. She's also an ex-girlfriend of the Douglas character.

Wuh-oh! Better watch out, Mike!

But because it's a two-hour movie, when Meredith invites him for an after-hours conference with some wine and her tongue in his ear, he goes--rather than saying, oh, I don't know--they've got e-mail at this high-tech Seattle firm?--"Hey, let me draw up a complete scenario of where we've been for that last three months with documentations and e-mail that to you, and then we can tackle it fresh in the morning." No, he doesn't do that, he's a little slow. Meredith, though, is pretty darn quick. When she starts unzipping his pants, what does he do? Stop her? Nooooo...When the simulated sex act begins? Noooooo. (I should mention that, at this point, Douglas does the patented Sharon Stone "pleasure" move from Basic Instinct--cock your head back so your neck is bent double and spasmodically open and close your mouth in a guppy fashion).

Finally, after the two are in a quasi-missionary position, the panting Douglas grows a conscience and decides to leave the office, after which Meredith follows him screaming "Get back and finish what you started, or you're dead, do you hear me?!" Since the office is in Pioneer Square, just about every bar-patron and driver on the Alaska Way Viaduct could hear her. As does the cleaning lady.

Anybody think this is a bit dumb?

It is. It gets dumber, when the Douglas character sues for sexual harassment, and she sues back. Crichton is making a point about sexual politics in a predatory environment in the work-place, but the message gets a bit dulled, and then the film-makers make a last-minute bid for political correctness that works as well as it did in The Bonfire of the Vanities, that is, not at all. Crichton was a hell of a writer, but his female characters were usually lacking personality (not that his male characters were ever fully developed), but were particularly and inexplicably fickle in their thinking. He was hardly a person to be objective about the battle of the sexes.** 

Even the high-tech elements are a little suspect, with a virtual environment that evidently sucks so much CPU that it slows down the "Delete" process long enough to make it a race to amp up the drama.Disclosure is a by-the-numbers package deal combining the movie-making cachet of Crichton, Douglas and Moore, in the hope it would translate to big bucks at the box-office. In that way, it resembles nothing so much as the fly-by-night computer companies that took a collective dive when the hi-tech bubble burst. Both had similar problems.

No one was buying.

* One of those very rare films set in Seattle that is actually filmed in Seattle rather than Vancouver, BC. Even Battle in Seattle about the WTO riots was filmed in Canada. Okay, they did come to town for a week-end to shoot pick-ups. 

** His non-fiction book, "Travels" has a couple of episodes where I got the impression that the author was not only a chauvinist, but an unapologetic one.

The Great Train Robbery (1978)

The Great Train Robbery (Michael Crichton, 1981) Michael Crichton learned of "The Great Gold Robbery" of 1885 (or as it was known at the time, "The First Great Train Robbery")* while giving a course on anthropology at Cambridge University (at the tender age of 22). He read the trial transcripts and found the story so fascinating—of the robbers' year of preparation and the purloining of keys to make wax impressions of them to manufacture duplicates to open the gold-bearing safes on the train—that he took to writing a novel about it changing the names of the criminals and some of the circumstances.

He published "The Great Train Robbery" in 1975, keeping the basic plot intact but with some authorial flourishes and changing the names of the main conspirators. "I find facts inhibiting," Crichton explained. "One has to have some fun. The more you know, the more you are obliged to tell the truth. I much prefer not to know. It's far more enjoyable trying to figure something out."

As opposed to the real mastermind of the crime, William Pierce, a ticket-taker for the very railway he would rob, Crichton's version is Edward Pierce (played in the film by Sean Connery), a grifter posing as a man of means, who recruits "Screwsman" Robert Agar (Donald Sutherland) and his multi-talented lover Miriam (Lesley-Anne Down) to pull off the majority of the steps necessary to lift the gold shipment meant to pay off the troops fighting the Crimean War.

The film's opening narration explains it all:

In the year 1855, England and France were at war with Russia in the Crimea. The English troops were paid in gold. Once a month, twenty-five thousand pounds in gold was loaded into strongboxes inside the London bank of Huddleston and Bradford and taken by trusted armed guards to the railway station. The convoy followed no fixed route or timetable.

At the station, the gold was loaded into the luggage van of the Folkestone train for shipment to the coast and from there to the Crimea. The strongboxes were placed into two specially-built Chubb safes constructed of three-quarter inch tempered steel. Each safe weighed five hundred and fifty pounds. Each safe was fitted with two locks, requiring two keys, or four keys altogether. 

For security, each key was individually protected. Two keys were entrusted to the railway dispatcher who kept them locked in his office. A third was in the custody of Mr. Edgar Trent, president of the Huddleston and Bradford. And the fourth key was given to Mr. Henry Fowler, manager of the Huddleston and Bradford. 

The presence of so much gold in one place naturally aroused the interest of the English criminal elements. 

But in 1855 there had never been a robbery from a moving railway train.

The toughest part of the plan is acquiring the four distinct keys required to open the two Chubb safes holding the gold in the cargo hold of the train. Those keys are guarded by separate individuals—the dispatcher, Trent and Fowler. The dispatcher keeps his keys locked away at the train station. Fowler wears his around his neck, even while bathing. And the Lord only knows where the president of the bank, Trent, keeps his key. But, if Pierce can find the originals, Agar can make paraffin impressions of them, with the aim of making copies. But, they have to get the keys before they can even consider robbing the train.

It's a 19th century version of the "Mission: Impossible" scenario, with just as many opportunities for things to go wrong, and thus, for the team to improvise and change plans on the fly. To secure the keys, they must case the train-station and infiltrate the lives of the bank-men to learn where they keep them and to take them from them...if only for the few seconds it will take to make good impressions.

Because so much of the book consists of detailed descriptions of the action required to pull off the many elements of the heist, so much of the book deals with those actions. But five pages of description may take 15 seconds of presentation on film. So, as the wordless action takes place, it is buttressed by dialog scenes that may be the weakest part of the film, as Crichton—who also wrote the screenplay—loads the film with double and borderline single entendres that feel a bit out of place in stuffy Victorian England.

Connery was pursued for the starring role (Nick Nolte wanted it), but after reading the script found it "heavy" and turned it down. Asked to reconsider, he read the novel, met with Crichton and the script started changing to the point where Crichton described the difference: "The book was straight, factual. But the movie is going to be closer to farce."** Indeed, it is. Sometimes to the point of the farce of a "Carry On" film.

But, Connery—who made a career out of making the most of double entendres, manages to make the most of most of them (some would fall flat delivered by even the wittiest of actors).

But, where Connery becomes essential is in the tense depiction of the heist; while the train is running, Connery's Pierce must move from his first-class cabin at the front of the train to the safes in the storage cars at the rear. The only way he can do that without creating suspicion is by scrambling out of sight of the passengers on the outside of the train.

While out there, Pierce is buffeted by wind, choked by smoke—at one point director Crichton's hair was set alight from sparks being belched from the smoke-stack—and very nearly scraped off the train roof by bridges and other obstacles grazing the train along the track.*** And it's really Connery up there, doing the dangerous stunt work of the moving train. Reportedly, the star's wife, Micheline, was seriously miffed at seeing some of the dangerous work Connery did for the filmed robbery when she accompanied the star at the premier.

Connery's influence on Crichton during the filming can be seen in his future novels written afterwards; it seems like he was basing a character on the actor in every novel. You look at Alan Grant in his "Jurassic Park" (played by Sam Neill in Spielberg's film), Charles Munro in "Congo" (played by Ernie Hudson in Frank Marshall's film) and John Connor in "Rising Sun" (played by...Connery in Philip Kaufman's film) and you see the actor fitting neatly into each role based on Crichton's description.

The film boasts two very large sets which cost 10% of the film's budget of 6 million dollars—the rather amazing recreation of London's Strand  as well as a recreation of the Crystal Palace. The Crystal Palace sequence is enhanced by being photographed at night with some extraordinary lighting effects by master cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth.

It would prove to be Unsworth's second-to-last film assignment (he would die of a heart attack while filming Roman Polanski's Tess) and the film is dedicated to him ("His Friends Miss Him"). It's certainly emblematic of the diverse nature of his work, giving day-lit scenes a burnished quality of an oil painting and bringing out amazing details even in the darkest of circumstances. If Crichton had any weaknesses as a director, he was aided immeasurably by Unsworth's eye.

The Great Train Robbery also boasts a maniacally boisterous score by Jerry Goldsmith that would fit into the "too-many-notes" school. In the same way that John Williams finds a proper rhythm for movies in his scores, Goldsmith always wrote to what the movie needed, rather than just enforcing what was on the screen. In this movie's case, it was to give a rather stately film with long-held shots more of the sensibility of a romp and providing a pell-mell momentum with more energy than even an on-coming train might provide.

It isn't perfect, but there are moments of grandeur (somewhat undercut by the farcical moments) in the telling of the tale and the technical aspects and in Connery's performance that more than make up for any descents into the sophomoric. It's certainly safe to say that it is Michael Crichton's best film.

Miriam: Do you ever tell anyone the truth?

Edward Pierce: The truth? The truth... no.

* It was called "The First Great Train Robbery" in Britain and Europe, owing to the notoriety of the more recent "Great Train Robbery" of 1963. When the book and the movie based on it were released in Europe it was under the title The First Great Train Robbery.

** The New York Times, January 28, 1979.

*** In his book of essays "Travels" Crichton tells the tale of the filming of The Great Train Robbery, where after one "take" filmed by an overhead helicopter, Connery started roaring to anyone who would listen that the train was travelling much faster than the designated 35 miles per hour. Connery could not be convinced when told that the speed—determined by the train engineer by timing the space between passing poles—that the speed was what was indicated—35 miles per hour. But, the helicopter pilot, filming the "Icarus-eye-view" of the speeding train indicated that his air-speed to keep up with the train was actually about 55 mph! That was all it took to mollify the pleased Connery. He'd been right all along.

Now I've Seen Everything Dept.: Michael Crichton

Doctored Images

The list of movies based on the novels of John Michael Crichton is impressive—The Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park (all parts), Congo, Disclosure, Timeline, Rising Sun (I like to call it "Rising Sean"), Sphere, The Terminal Man...as successful as the novels were on the Best Sellers lists, there are not a lot of "hit movies" there for a "hit-maker." The truth is, Crichton was a "must-read" author (whichever psuedonym he wrote under--Jeffrey Hudson, John Lange, or Michael Douglas) that did "okay" in other media, up until Jurassic Park—and Crichton's partnership with Steven Spielberg and Amblin to create the television series "E.R."—catapulted him into the job where he was most successful—as a producer/creator.* Crichton had a knack for conceptualizing great ideas, but he wasn't always good making compelling drama out of them—noticeably, in characterization.  His geeks, techs, and Ph.d.'s were always a little dull, to the point where, reading Crichton, you would struggle remembering the characters in the book. It would take others to make his novels breathe and "matter" on dramatic levels beyond concerns about science and sociology. 

In between, after his association with the filming of The Andromeda Strain, Crichton began angling for working in the movies, which he achieved fairly quickly and efficiently. But despite having created a library of viable projects, Crichton rarely adapted his own work, only directing two of his novels (and doing producorial tinkering on another), adapting other ideas that seemed less suited for fleshing out in novel form. His directing career has an odd look to it:after his initial success, he worked on B-films with limited budgets and "pulp-ish," exploitative themes, with interchangeable characters, who seemed to be more "jobs" than people.  As his literary career advanced to more complicated scenarios, his film career took the opposite tack, devolving into the pulp field in which he started his writing.

Crichton died of lymphoma on November 8, 2008. He was 66.

Pursuit (1972) An ABC "Movie of the Week," late edition,* which Crichton directed from his own novel (entitled "Binary," written under the nom-de-plume John Lange) about far-right radicals (played by E.G. Marshall and Martin Sheen) attempting to kill the sitting President at the Republican convention for his dealings with Communist countries.  Three federal agents (Ben Gazzara, William Windom, and Jim McMullan) trace their activities to an apartment where two canisters of gas are contained and equipped with a timer and booby-traps.  Analysis reveals that the two gases are harmless separately, but when combined are a deadly nerve gas that can wipe out San Diego.  How do they stop it in time...especially as the room is sealed with enough of the combined gas to kill whoever enters it.  A nifty trap, that.  And Crichton, in his first directing gig, manages to make a spare, taut little thriller, with a budget, long on casting and short on frills.  Pursuit also features a primitive score by Jerry Goldsmith, who would figure in quite a few Crichton films.

Westworld (1973) Crichton came up with the scrap of a story about immersive theme-parks with robots (ala Disneyland's audio-animatronics) and brought it to M-G-M (then being run—into the ground—by James Aubrey, Jr., who was busy turning the film studio into its own version of Casino-world). It's a cautionary tale of putting too much faith in technology as two buddies (James Brolin and Richard Benjamin) spend $1000 per day to go to the Delos Corporations' Westworld theme-park (there is also Roman World and Medieval World) where, among the activities are shoot-outs with a Gunslinger (Yul Brynner, straight out of The Magnificent Seven). A computer virus infects the facility and "things" start to get out of control (you can see the dinosaur bones of what would be Jurassic Park in the basic plot of the film). Crichton wrote about his experience directing the film in his published screenplay, and was quite honest in his frustrations dealing with a constantly shrinking budget and time constraints. But, despite the headaches, the film turned into one of M-G-M's few hits at the time. Westworld is a mildly amusing diversion and spawned a sequel—Futureworld—which the writer-director had nothing to do with and a TV series—Beyond Westworld—in 1980. that was cancelled after three airings. There have been frequent threats in the trades that a remake is in the works, but plans are now for it to be turned into an HBO series (adapted by Jonathan Nolan and his wife "Burn Notice" creator Lisa Joy) debuting in 2016.

It should also be noted that Westworld is the first movie to feature digital pixelization of previously filmed images (showing the robots POV).

Coma (1978) Crichton takes on a directing job from someone else's work, in this case Robin Cook, known for writing medical thrillers—something close to Crichton's experience as a medical student and internist (Crichton and Cook were acquaintances). Genevieve Bujold and Michael Douglas star as two surgical residents who stumble onto an odd epidemic—healthy young people entering the hospital are going into unexplained comas following surgeries, from which they never come out! They're shipped off to the Jefferson Institute for extended care. Bujold's character talks her way into a tour of the facility and finds that it's more of a warehouse for coma patients with no rooms, no beds, but is more of a low-cost suspended life support system for care of indeterminate length that is the stuff of medical nightmares (one of those patients is a pre-stardom Tom Selleck).

Her suspicions lead her to her hospital's chief of surgery (Richard Widmark) who becomes her ally in getting to the bottom of what is going on. Crichton's directorial hand is far more sure than it was in Westworld (he admits he was going for genre cliche with the earlier film), and the film is genuinely creepy and suspenseful.***

It was remade as a mini-series for A&E (by the Scott Brothers) in 2012.

The Great Train Robbery (aka The First Great Train Robbery, 1979) Nasty little version of the Crichton book, which takes on every detail of the book and its elaborate train heist...EXCEPT its tone. Crichton wrote his own adaptation for producer Dino DeLaurentiis and kept to his plot (based on "The Great Gold Robbery" of 1855) with much fictionalization going on. Sean Connery plays Edward Pierce, a larcenous gentleman who conspires with Robert Agar (Donald Sutherland), several Victorian low-lifes and his mistress, Miriam's (Leslie Anne-Down) to abscond with the contents of a diabolically complicated safe—they carry the gold that is intended for funding of the Crimean War. The plot involves several minor subterfuges as a prelude to the big score and that exercise takes on a "Mission: Impossible" tone as anything that might go wrong does, despite the group's elaborate planning.

The big difference between novel and film is dialog—there is an almost schoolboy emphasis on sex in a lot of the discussions, and the by-play between Pierce and Miriam fairly crackle with none too subtle innuendo. Connery can only do so much with this before it wears thin. Where Connery was invaluable was doing the actual stunts on top of the train during the climax, which look incredibly dangerous and sometimes threaten to lop his head off. This has a rollicking score by Jerry Goldsmith. This was the second-to-last film of famed British cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth.

Looker (1981) Albert Finney stars in a film about Society's quest for perfection and Industry's quest to exploit it to manipulate human beings. 

And it has some nudity, too.

Finney plays Dr. Larry Roberts, a successful Beverly Hills plastic surgeon who usually cuts and forgets, but who becomes suspicious when three of his former patients end up dead, having committed suicide. The victims either merely wanted to leave a beautiful corpse or something nefarious is going on. So Roberts follows up with another of his patients Cindy Fairmont (Susan Dey), which leads him to a research firm called Digital Matrix. The models had been using digital scans as benchmarks for the plastic surgeries to "perfect" their looks, but Roberts discovers that the scans are also being used to replace the models with digital replicas for commercials, making the women replaceable in the marketplace.

Twelve years later, CGI would be used to make fully believable dinosaurs for the movie adaptation of Crichton's Jurassic Park, and, eventually, to replace human actors in films, making Looker, if not a great film, at least prescient.

Runaway (1984) Tom Selleck, having seemingly come out of his Coma from 1978, plays Sgt. Jack Ramsey, a future-cop specializing in deactivating the latest electronic conveniences when they go astray—more of a "'bot squad" than a bomb squad. He faces his toughest challenge when a robot wipes out an entire family and he and his new partner (Cynthia Rhodes) are sent out to investigate what appears to be the first robot murder. Their investigation leads them to a cyber-sicko, Dr. Charles Luther (played by Gene Simmons of KISS), a former defense contractor who's making all types of mass-produced killer-bots smart enough to target individual humans and track them thermally. Even though he's a genius, he seems to have lost some of his crucial circuit templates to a former lover (Kristie Alley). Ramsey and his team start to become targets of Luther's attacks, some of which seem dangerous, and some of which just seem very silly. It doesn't hold very much interest, either as sci-fi or thriller. Features the first all-electronic score by Jerry Goldsmith. 

Physical Evidence (1989) Crichton's last directorial work is this courtroom mystery featuring Theresa Russell as a public defender, assigned to defend an ex-cop with anger issues (Burt Reynolds), accused of killing an informant he's had past dealings with. He's evasive with the truth, but she's determined to get to the bottom of the crime, despite the complications it causes in her personal life.

It's not a great film to go out on, although Reynolds rises to the occasion, at least treating the project with respect. Russell, however, comes off as being petulant and stilted. But, she's not the only one, a lot of the actors are over-the-top in this one (including, incredibly, Ned Beatty), as if there was an attempt to have as many suspects as possible, if "anger issues" was a prime component for a suspect. John Alonzo does fine camera work and it boasts a score (however lackluster) by Henry Mancini, but the film is a mis-fire, and, except for one instance, where Crichton stepped in to shepherd an adaptation of one of his novels, it would be the last work of Crichton as a film-maker.

The 13th Warrior (1999) The adaptation of Crichton's "Eaters of the Dead"**** was a project helmed by John McTiernan, but a ballooning budget and poor audience previews, caused the studio to fire McTiernan and hire the author (for whatever reason) to oversee re-shoots and post-production of the film in order to "save" it. The result was a name change from the books title to the less provocative The 13th Warrior, re-shoots, re-edits, and replacing Graeme Revell's score with one by Crichton's frequent collaborator, Jerry Goldsmith. Despite the latter efforts, the movie still performed poorly at the box-office and has garnered a reputation as a box-office "dud." 

The thing is, it's not bad, a gritty fish-out-of-water story as Antonio Banderas' Arab translator and ambassador (based on Ahmad ibn Fadlan) is taken captive by Vikings and roped into an adventure to save their village from "mist-warriors," the bestial and cannibalistic "wendol."  The characters are fairly well-distinguished from each other (something that can't often be said for Crichton) and the look and feel of it recalls what Peter Jackson produced for his "Middle Earth" movies. It does fall down slightly in the action department, despite the sword-play; it's just hard to determine who's fighting whom if it weren't for the costumes. Still, it's a cut above what passes for sword-and-sandals films these days.

* Crichton began writing while he was studying medicine and using the advances to pay for his education. He wrote under psuedonyms lest the medical bureaucracy he was studying within kick him out, and began using his own name with "The Andromeda Strain". Crichton also believed it was just as well. He would cite Dr. Jonas Salk telling him "you're a better writer than a doctor."

** The series of 1 1/2 to two hour TV-movies launched many TV-series concepts as well as the career of Steven Spielberg, when his "Duel" became one of the early popular "Movies of the Week."

*** When Crichton expressed nervousness about working with the British crew for The Great Train Robbery, cinematographer Unsworth suggested showing them a print of Coma, which immediately garnered some respect for the "yank" director.

**** Crichton's conceit in the story was to create a new version of "Beowulf," and, as he'd done with other novels, faked the references to convince that it was somehow real.

The Andromeda Strain (1971)

The Andromeda Strain (Robert Wise, 1971) Robert Wise's return to science-fiction (The Day the Earth Stood Still) after years in the musical field (West Side Story, The Sound of Music, Star!) proved that he was still as effective as a gritty story teller as he was a choreographer. Michael Crichton's first best-seller (he'd paid his way through medical school writing pulp novels and thrillers, then abandoned a potential medical career to continue writing) hit the wave of nervousness fearing "moon-germs" infesting Earth from the first Apollo moon-landings. Crichton had a fascinating little gambit—he filled the book with graphs and text and bibliography references that gave the book the air of legitimacy, when, in fact, he made everything up whole cloth, even the citations. Nobody cried "fowl," or hauled him before Oprah to be pilloried. He merely went on to write his series of oddly-cautionary fast-reads of the dangers of current technology, all like prose-screenplays waiting to be filmed, only occasionally departing from the formula to write something of his own interest ("The Great Train Robbery," "Eaters of the Dead"). His characters were largely cyphers, until after a brief flirtation with movie-making, all of his male lead characters seemed to be based on Sean Connery (who starred in Crichton's film of his own The Great Train Robbery).*

But, that's the future. For The Andromeda Strain, Wise pulled off a similar cinematic trick to keep it real—he didn't cast stars, just good character actors (and a couple of formidable stage actors) for the leads, filmed what was essentially a "bottle show" (mostly taking place in a contained space with few exteriors in an unfussy, clean style in wide panavision and split-screen, and included the first instance of on-screen date/time/location computer updates graphiced across the screen to orient ourselves. It's played out in as un-melodramatic a way as was possible with minimum effects.

Arthur Hill, David Wayne, Kate Reid and James Olson:
just fine actors who could "sell" the impossible.

Wise and screenwriter Nelson Giddings do a thorough job of negotiating Crichton's juggled narrative and technical jargon, not withholding anything essential to the investigation no matter how arcane, and then boil it down like a detective story to the central puzzle: why two disparate survivors of a decimating encounter with a returning space capsule escaped having their blood crystallized, specifically, how is a perfectly healthy, squawling baby similar to a decrepit vagabond with a bleeding ulcer and a taste for drinking sterno. Obvious answers are discarded one by one and it's a neat exercise in re-thinking a problem. 

Meanwhile, there's a lot of specific and very intricate laboratory work going on, that not only shows the process, but the sheer grinding duplication that such a thorough testing and deciphering must entail. And for once, the examination that is made of Andromeda is not dumbed down with off-screen work and a bursting entrance through a door announcing what new discovery has been made; a casual observer with no history of medicine or biology will learn a lot about organisms and infections and how they function, as well as the odd lesson in decision-making, the prejudice against epilepsy-sufferers and feng shui as related to color.

It's smart. And it assumes the viewer is smart enough to follow along, and that's refreshing (especially compared to its mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging remake—see below), and it's core cast (the irreplaceable Arthur Hill and Kate Reid, David Wayne and James Olsen) does a terrific job of underplaying the drama (the smaller, more bureaucratic roles have a tendency to drift towards melodrama and easy caricature), and it has a smashing pay-off with one of the best cliff-hangers in sci-fi history (as did the book, and you'd have to be pretty incompetent (see below) to keep it from being a nail-biter.

It's a neglected techno-thriller from two of the masters of their respective crafts at the top of their games.

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From the top of the game to the bottom of the barrel. The A & E network aired a two-part miniseries that "updated" "The Andromeda Strain." "Update" must be Hollywood code for "screwing up." As produced by the Scott brothers (Ridley and Tony), directed by Mikael Solomon (cinematographer for Ron Howard and James Cameron, so he's done hazard-duty), and scripted by Robert Schenkkan (a Pulitzer Prize winner for the play "The Kentucky Cycle"), this botched version of the novel by "J. Michael Crichton" (as he was listed in the credits. He never went by that pen-name ever) takes the biological warfare angle from Wise's film and makes it the central subject of the movie. The Wildfire crew is expanded from four experts to five ethnically and discipline-diverse researchers (to make it CSI-familiar—how novel), and they're all sniping unpleasant people--Jeremy Stone (Benjamin Bratt) is a fair-weather father/absent husband, who's had a past affair with one of the other crew, and chooses to revive it while the world is supposedly coming to an end—just the kind of guy I want in a crisis. The film-makers play up the ick factor with "Andromeda" expanding its field to drive low inhabitants crazy, and work its way up the food-chain, although the special effects boys peter out at the end and become content to represent the infection as a red optical smudge. The President of the United States becomes a major figure, albeit one who sits around being befuddled, but always has a sage bit of wisdom for each new development. And there's the creepy, snarky reporter who's looking for The Big Story (no matter who it hurts) and he's played by Eric McCormack ("Will & Grace") with vacillating priorities.

The central question—what does a baby have in common with a sterno-drinking bum—is tossed off, ignored, and rendered irrelevant (as are the survivors) in favor of new-science voodoo of worm-holes, time-discrepancies and other space-rot, that, if anybody actually sat down and thought about it, makes the Andromeda bacillus completely devoid of a point of origin. But hey, if you can combine the original with "CSI," and plot-elements of Contact, and, yes, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, it should be good enough for an unchoosy Sci-Fi Channel subscriber, one who's happy with the sub-par "original movies" along the lines of "T-REX Mutants!" Somewhere along the way, the broadcast channel got upped to A & E (that stands for "Arts and Entertainment"—it's where you can see such low-hanging fare as "Duck Dynasty" and "Storage War$")—and, still, they must feel snookered at the result.*

It's a nasty, stupid piece of work, done with little care for its viewers or source material. Hopefully, Crichton got some money out of it (he had nothing to do with it, not even producing).

With all this new technology why do these schmoes insist on re-making GOOD science fiction films (they also "updated" Wise's The Day The Earth Stood Still, which, when it was released, was, frankly, still-born)? Why don't they make a better version of Damnation Alley, or Saturn 3, or even Crichton's Terminal Man? Those might be worth a try, given their history. Maybe something good could actually come of it.

* Let's list them:  Munro from "Congo", Norman Johnson from "Sphere," Alan Grant from "Jurassic Park," and, of course, John Connor from "Rising Sun."

** They didn't. Trade ads crowed that ten million souls watched this drek.