Yesterday I watched, back to back, the 2008 television version of Michael Crichton's novel, the Andromeda Strain, and the 1971 film of the same novel. Both are good and I don't really intend this to be a review of them. Instead what I'd like to comment on is how they show up the prevailing attitudes and obsessions of their respective times.
I don't mean the styles of the films, nor the cinematic qualities, nor the special effects. I don't even mean the way that the "cutting edge" technology of the film seems so quaint (as the TV version doubtless will twenty years from now.)
No I'm thinking of the way that the characters lives and backgrounds are portrayed and in particular the way that the plot, substantially the same, varies to reflect the attitudes of the day.
Taken together these two films make an interesting and intriguing social document. Take the main characters, for example. In the 1971 version there are four main members of the Wildfire team, three men and a woman. They are all upstanding citizens, middle-class, middle-aged, respectable white scientists of good, honest morally unambiguous backgrounds. A single example will suffice. The leader of the Wildfire project is Doctor Stone. When the army comes to alert him to a problem, he is at a family dinner party. His wife's main worry is that there are men with guns in the street (whatever will the neighbours think?) and that the dinner party will be disrupted.
In the 2008 version there are five of them, three white, one black, one Asian. There is a much wider age spread. There are three men and two women. One of them has a military background, one of them was involved in some dubious biological warfare research, only one is happily married and that is just a plot device to allow her to be blackmailed later. The leader now comes from a broken marriage and has an embittered teenage son and a mentally unstable ex-wife. One of the other members of his team is the former student with whom his affair was responsible for the family breakdown. This characterisation would have been more or less unthinkable in 1971.
There is also a significant change to the background characters. Outside Project Wildfire there are no characters of significance in the original. One character survives – General Manachek (strangely changing his name from Arthur to George for no particular reason and his race from Caucasian to Afro-American in keeping with the multi-ethnicity of modern times). Initially a very similar character to the original (a career soldier, with a very military point of view), he undergoes a bit of an apotheosis at the end of the 2008 version and ends up on the side of the scientists, morally speaking, rather than the military. The fact that in the 1971 version the scientists and military are already on the same side shouldn't be overlooked.
There is an additional, plot-driven, character in the 2008 version. Jack Nash, a pill-popping, glue-sniffing, alcoholic journalist who is hot on the trail of the story while being pursued by sinister government types who want to kill him. This character simply couldn't have been put into the original, partly because of the lifestyle he is shown as having but mostly because it wouldn't have worked because his segment of the plot is very much a product of the post X-Files conspiracy-obsessed generation.
And that's where we come on to look at some significant plot changes. All of the main plot is intact. Satellite crashes to Earth. Deadly virus is released. Town dies except for two survivors. Scientists at secret lab race to find a way to destroy the virus. Many of the key scenes are almost shot for shot remakes. The trouble is that that is pretty much all of the original. It's a slow paced piece focussing entirely on what they are doing to solve the problem. There is a small subplot about a Senate Committee wanting to cut funding for the project and antagonism between the senate committee and the scientists. The project is temporarily cut off from the outside world by an equipment malfunction. (A device necessary for plot reasons.) However, everybody is on the same side. Everybody wants to save America and the world. Everybody is a good guy. Unsurprisingly the good guys succeed but where the "virus" came from and what it is remain a bit of a mystery.
What about now? Well now, we come onto the preoccupations of our time in a big way. The basic conflict is now between shadowy Government agencies who want to exploit the virus as a biological weapon and scientists who want to save the world. The project is intentionally denied contact with the outside world to force them to toe the line. The story is less about finding out what to do about the problem than it is about this conflict of interests. There is a subplot involving the flawed, but decent, journalist who tries to expose them while they try to kill him. There is another subplot involving injudicious exploitation of natural resources which may set the world on a path to disaster. And, because nothing is allowed to remain unexplained, there is a weird subplot about the virus having been sent through a wormhole from the future and containing microscopically coded secret messages.
We live in paranoid times. The X-Files and a thousand other programs have conditioned us to expect Governmental conspiracy. No program that involves Government can show it as being clean and acting in the interests of the people. The Government is always the bad guy. Here among other things, they shoot people, blow up their own helicopters and personnel trying to kill a journalist, kidnap a family to blackmail a doctor and want to use a plague that will destroy the world as a weapon.
This is the major theme of the new version. It's familiar ground. In everything, from the Sarah Connor Chronicles to Spooks, the government is shown as at best morally grey and at worst, downright evil. Apart from that bizarre and unnecessary time-travel-subplot, the Andromeda strain reflects the modern trend to jump at shadows and see conspiracies in what is usually no more than incompetence. Somewhere between then and now we have lost both our belief in the family and our trust in Government. Either or both of these things may or may not be good and may or may not be justified – I take no stance on the matter – but they have, to judge by our media, certainly happened. Whether the films are a product of the prevailing mores or vice-versa is a harder question but, as I said before, these two versions of the same thing make an interesting social document comparing the two eras.
(And oh boy, do those 1970s computers, and ticker-tapes, and medical equipment, and… …and everything, look quaint. I shall revisit this post in twenty years, if I'm still around, and comment on the quaintness of the computer simulations, the voice activated equipment and the biological hazard suits in the 2008 version.)
I don't mean the styles of the films, nor the cinematic qualities, nor the special effects. I don't even mean the way that the "cutting edge" technology of the film seems so quaint (as the TV version doubtless will twenty years from now.)
No I'm thinking of the way that the characters lives and backgrounds are portrayed and in particular the way that the plot, substantially the same, varies to reflect the attitudes of the day.
Taken together these two films make an interesting and intriguing social document. Take the main characters, for example. In the 1971 version there are four main members of the Wildfire team, three men and a woman. They are all upstanding citizens, middle-class, middle-aged, respectable white scientists of good, honest morally unambiguous backgrounds. A single example will suffice. The leader of the Wildfire project is Doctor Stone. When the army comes to alert him to a problem, he is at a family dinner party. His wife's main worry is that there are men with guns in the street (whatever will the neighbours think?) and that the dinner party will be disrupted.
In the 2008 version there are five of them, three white, one black, one Asian. There is a much wider age spread. There are three men and two women. One of them has a military background, one of them was involved in some dubious biological warfare research, only one is happily married and that is just a plot device to allow her to be blackmailed later. The leader now comes from a broken marriage and has an embittered teenage son and a mentally unstable ex-wife. One of the other members of his team is the former student with whom his affair was responsible for the family breakdown. This characterisation would have been more or less unthinkable in 1971.
There is also a significant change to the background characters. Outside Project Wildfire there are no characters of significance in the original. One character survives – General Manachek (strangely changing his name from Arthur to George for no particular reason and his race from Caucasian to Afro-American in keeping with the multi-ethnicity of modern times). Initially a very similar character to the original (a career soldier, with a very military point of view), he undergoes a bit of an apotheosis at the end of the 2008 version and ends up on the side of the scientists, morally speaking, rather than the military. The fact that in the 1971 version the scientists and military are already on the same side shouldn't be overlooked.
There is an additional, plot-driven, character in the 2008 version. Jack Nash, a pill-popping, glue-sniffing, alcoholic journalist who is hot on the trail of the story while being pursued by sinister government types who want to kill him. This character simply couldn't have been put into the original, partly because of the lifestyle he is shown as having but mostly because it wouldn't have worked because his segment of the plot is very much a product of the post X-Files conspiracy-obsessed generation.
And that's where we come on to look at some significant plot changes. All of the main plot is intact. Satellite crashes to Earth. Deadly virus is released. Town dies except for two survivors. Scientists at secret lab race to find a way to destroy the virus. Many of the key scenes are almost shot for shot remakes. The trouble is that that is pretty much all of the original. It's a slow paced piece focussing entirely on what they are doing to solve the problem. There is a small subplot about a Senate Committee wanting to cut funding for the project and antagonism between the senate committee and the scientists. The project is temporarily cut off from the outside world by an equipment malfunction. (A device necessary for plot reasons.) However, everybody is on the same side. Everybody wants to save America and the world. Everybody is a good guy. Unsurprisingly the good guys succeed but where the "virus" came from and what it is remain a bit of a mystery.
What about now? Well now, we come onto the preoccupations of our time in a big way. The basic conflict is now between shadowy Government agencies who want to exploit the virus as a biological weapon and scientists who want to save the world. The project is intentionally denied contact with the outside world to force them to toe the line. The story is less about finding out what to do about the problem than it is about this conflict of interests. There is a subplot involving the flawed, but decent, journalist who tries to expose them while they try to kill him. There is another subplot involving injudicious exploitation of natural resources which may set the world on a path to disaster. And, because nothing is allowed to remain unexplained, there is a weird subplot about the virus having been sent through a wormhole from the future and containing microscopically coded secret messages.
We live in paranoid times. The X-Files and a thousand other programs have conditioned us to expect Governmental conspiracy. No program that involves Government can show it as being clean and acting in the interests of the people. The Government is always the bad guy. Here among other things, they shoot people, blow up their own helicopters and personnel trying to kill a journalist, kidnap a family to blackmail a doctor and want to use a plague that will destroy the world as a weapon.
This is the major theme of the new version. It's familiar ground. In everything, from the Sarah Connor Chronicles to Spooks, the government is shown as at best morally grey and at worst, downright evil. Apart from that bizarre and unnecessary time-travel-subplot, the Andromeda strain reflects the modern trend to jump at shadows and see conspiracies in what is usually no more than incompetence. Somewhere between then and now we have lost both our belief in the family and our trust in Government. Either or both of these things may or may not be good and may or may not be justified – I take no stance on the matter – but they have, to judge by our media, certainly happened. Whether the films are a product of the prevailing mores or vice-versa is a harder question but, as I said before, these two versions of the same thing make an interesting social document comparing the two eras.
(And oh boy, do those 1970s computers, and ticker-tapes, and medical equipment, and… …and everything, look quaint. I shall revisit this post in twenty years, if I'm still around, and comment on the quaintness of the computer simulations, the voice activated equipment and the biological hazard suits in the 2008 version.)
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