He looks dressed for a weekend in South Beach, and amid the film’s urgent atmosphere, he adds all the tension of someone conducting a tax audit. Jeremy Stone of the novel, is played here by Benjamin Bratt in a tight-fitting T-shirt, should immediately give us pause. The military is called in to contain the disaster, and a team of high-status scientific researchers is assembled to determine the capacities of whatever is causing this plague and thus forestall the end of civilization. Less faithful to the original text than Robert Wise’s 1971 film, the current version, whose executive producers include Tony and Ridley Scott, retains the essential elements of the plot: a government satellite on an intergalactic germ-related fact-finding mission crashes into a small town out West, emitting a deadly pathogen that kills everyone nearby save for an unhealthy older man and a baby whose survival is an epidemiological mystery. In its most recent adaptation, as a four-hour mini-series beginning Monday night on A&E, it quakes with the noise of nearly every threat to our national well-being. Since the 1980s “The Andromeda Strain” could be read as an AIDS or Ebola or bird-flu novel. At the time of its publication it spoke not only to cold war fears but also to more up-to-the-minute notions that lunar missions might result in the importation of perilous contaminants from the Moon. It can shape-shift into a dozen metaphors. “The Andromeda Strain,” Michael Crichton’s 1969 novel, written while he was still a medical student at Harvard, is like one of the mutations the book painstakingly describes.
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