So a cure for the virus is discovered and every body's happy until the self destruct mechanism is activated. Ok, no prob, seen it a hundred times, but you need a big finish so I'll go with it. Then the only panel that the system can be deactivated from on their floor is damaged. Sigh....sure, let's just get on with it. THEN, our heroes manage to find a a way to access another floor in the super-safe-quarantine lab within seconds. Oops, not so secure after all. And, of course, it just happens to be through this huge elevator shaft that doesn't have an elevator but does drop straight down to the coolant tank for the nuclear reactor power plant that is about to blow up the facility. Now Benjamin Bratt and Ricky Schroder have to monkey climb up this thing which for some unknown reason begins to rain down debris just to make things more exciting. Huh? The reactor is at the base of the facility. What the hell is with the styrofoam falling from the sky? Now because Schroder is not 12 but has changed his name back to a 12 year old's, he has to die. He avoids an easy escape and sacrifices himself for the greater good. Uh oh! We need his thumb print to deactivate the self-destruct? Enter Daniel Dae Kim who now sacrifices himself to jump in the coolant tank and chop off Schroeder's thumb. Not sure why the coolant kills him, but whatever, lesser characters need to die here, just following formula. Now, Kim's character has just suffered a gran mal seizure but 5 minutes ago. Somehow though he is able to throw a human thumb something like 60 straight up to Benjamin Bratt while dying in a vat of reactor coolant. That's impressive.
Bratt catches the thumb, finds an opening to the floor he needs and is then blinded by hot steam. Oh, for Christ's sake... Onward hero! So now he crawls his way down an air vent, which somehow collapses underneath him as it's suffering from the same poor engineering that's causing the styrofoam roof to fall. Down he falls to the floor, broken and blind. Blah blah blah, self-destruct shut down with less than 20 seconds to go, yadda yadda yadda. I stayed up til midnight for this? I gotta get up at 5am, bitches, and this is the ending you give me? Seriously?
Posts
Ended up here after googling for the Andromeda Strain characters that died in the book.
ReplyDeleteI was so annoyed at that lame ending (with all lesser characters dying for no apparent reason) that I needed to check if this actually happened in the book.
Very cool post. :-)