chriscoates
This is a fine example of British science-fiction. Necessarily wordy due to its low-budget, successful British SF has always had to rely on strong concepts, strong writing and carefully created atmosphere. In the same vain as Quatermass and Dr Who much of the action consists of people in a room talking about abstracts. Some will be bored to tears; but those with an imagination may find this story of predeterminism vs personal will and morality very engaging. If there's a flaw then it's that some of the, very real, science is over-simplified to an unbelievable degree. An audience is able to accept the idea of an alien transmission containing instructions on how to make a malevolent supercomputer. But the idea that these scientists are also experts in genetic engineering and quickly have all of the expertise and equipment necessary for their task stretches credibility too far. It's a shame because these problems could have been easily avoided with a little more creativity. At heart though this is a good, old-fashioned, morality play with some impressive performances and a rare intelligence.
mrg106
Despite some of the disparaging comments on here, I gave this a go and I think it was more than worth an hour and a half of my time. I enjoy Si-fi that's more based on ideas than SFX, and this was a prime (if somewhat truncated) example. I agree they could have done with more time but I didn't see anything wrong with the acting, Tom Hardy being particularly good. All in all very watchable stuff, which deals with issues from the more interesting end of science fiction..p.s, paulj-murphy, I know you probably wanted to look smart but they didn't send any messages to Andromeda, they only conversed with the computer, which wasn't millions of light-years away after all...
paulj-murphy
Any schoolboy would be ashamed of the scientific mistakes in this. For example, the team send radio messages to Andromeda and get immediate replies! Andromeda is millions of light years away and so any radio signals would take millions of years to get there and back! Also, at one point in the story a technician saves a genome or record of the entire genetic code of a human being on a single floppy disk! Fred Hoyle would be rotating in his grave.The acting is equally bad. The two male leads are the "geekiest" type of anoraks one could possibly hope not to meet, and they are as wet as they come. Neither speak their lines clearly. And the Army General is about as nonmilitary as you could get...he looks like your average window cleaner.Please please please just go back to making them the way they originally did in the sixties, BBC...
stuart_poore
** Contains minor spoiler** Despite being a remake of the 1960s BBC series, this comes across as an uninspired cross between Contact and Species. It is filmed using the typical cheap BBC Sci-Fi manner i.e. dull, grey, overcast and in a quarry. They spend the budget on the one "special effect", which is, of course, destroyed at the end. The story is unconvincing and the basic science is badly flawed (real time communication to Andromeda anyone?)It tries to pad out a thin story line with the addition of a few extraneous few subplots, namely a love triangle, some espionage and the oh so stereotypical "government subverting science for evil" thing. Even Jane Asher can't drag this up from being a long, slow, and predictable hour and a half.
AD
