When I heard that there will be a miniseries based on "The Andromeda Strain" book, I was very exited. That was one of my favorite sci-fi books in my childhood. After watching the miniseries I must conclude that this is another book perverted and trivialized by Hollywood. SPOILERS AHEAD!

They created some crazy pseido-sci-fi idea that humans from the future sent Andromeda back from the future via a wormhole in a container that contained a message which was then picked up by a satellite that was sent up to investigate the wormhole. No wormhole was there in the book. The book had a much more modest idea - a Scoop satellite was to skim the outer layers of the atmosphere for mutations of common Earth bacteria for military purposes when it was impacted my a micrometeorite carrying the Andromeda. Much more probable, no need to involve wormholes, time travel, ASCII messages, eco-terrorists and a sub-plot on conservation of marine species.

Due to extreme modernization of the script, the whole subplot of the teletype mechanical failure was omitted. Andromeda was made sentient instead and communicated via 'some kind of inductive field' to shoot down a fighter jet and activate a nuke.

The survivors and their pH levels got barely a glance. Also the amount of destruction was obviously too low for the movie, so the Andromeda was made to mutate more, spread out of containment easily and even make a flock of birds attack a squad of solders 'Hitchcock style'. Disgustingly cheap scriptwriting.

Huge chunks of plot were ripped out (searching for the micro-meteorite impact crater with different lenses, central core security) and the two hours were filled with Rembo style journalism vs. black ops, selfless president and scenes of animals eating each other and dieing. At the end they ran out of budget and just made it look like presence of Andromeda made air and water bright red so that people would have something to run away from in fear. Oh and the scientists are allowed to freely talk about the event after it's done. Yeah, right.

In my book this movie rates very close to the infamous "The Core" with the only difference that they managed to fuck up a really good book. Do not watch it and read the book instead.