Saturday, June 14, 2008

Two things…

1. Battlestar Galactica, Season 4, Finale: Wow. It wasn’t until the end that I realized that a crucial piece of information is still not out there. This was a good season that makes up for last season, which I thought was morose and odd. But I guess we needed it to get to the stuff that happened this season. I’m looking forward to the final season and the last of the answers.

2. We watched the first disc of the remake of The Andromeda Strain last night. It’s been 25+ years since I read the book by Michael Crichton, but so far it seems to only loosely resemble the original story. Maybe I’m remembering it wrong, though.

The United States government is given a warning by the pre-eminent biophysicists in the country: current sterilization procedures applied to returning space probes may be inadequate to guarantee uncontaminated re-entry to the atmosphere.

Two years later, seventeen satellites are sent into the outer fringes of space to “collect organisms and dust for study.” One of them falls to earth, landing in a desolate area of Arizona.

Twelve miles from the landing site, in the town of Piedmont, a shocking discovery is made: the streets are littered with the dead bodies of the town’s inhabitants, as if they dropped dead in their tracks.

It’s not fantastic, but it isn’t terrible either. I’m sure we’ll finish it tonight after church - I’ll revise the review when I’ve seen the whole thing.

[UPDATE 6/15]: Finished it yesterday. The book is worth the read. The original movie is very good. This remake is not great, not terrible. We laughed at some of the things that happened in the last 20 minutes or so. 2.5 stars out of 5.

3. Needing to catch up on the DVR: I have a lot of things recorded that still need watching - several episodes of Hell’s Kitchen, old episodes of Psych, a couple eps of The Mole to name a few.