A for Andromeda (2006)

Following their interesting live remake / reworking of The Quatermass Experiment, BBC4 here tries something similar with Fred Hoyle and John Elliot's 1961 serial – again, Richard Fell distils six episodes into a feature-length singleton and very quietly slips in post-Cold War updates, but newcoming director John Strickland isn't required to cope with the demands of live television. It may well be that the original material doesn't hold up as well as anything by Nigel Kneale, but this is a lot less gripping than Quatermass, with conventional espionage/paranoia/evil government subplots pruned but vestigial, and a personal drama that just lies there dead, hardly helped by a peculiar boffin performance from beardy Tom Hardy that comes across as more alien and alienating than the actual ET. The original has been copied (and developed) several times, so a lot of business is now familiar from Contact and Species, and this tends to turn into a fairly perfunctory run-through of the themes. At a MoD-funded research station, unconventional John Fleming (Hardy) receives and decodes a signal from Andromeda which gives instructions for the building of a giant computer (a big spherical thing) and then the creation of an artificial humanoid that winds up taking the shape of a scientist (Kelly Reilly) who Fleming was involved with and has been semi-mysteriously been killed by a zap effect. Jane Asher plays the senior scientist who clashes with Fleming – and the storyline suffers from the hero's change of heart halfway through whereby he goes from irritatingly insistent on following the outer space orders to quiveringly determined to put a stop to what seems likely to count as an alien invasion.

By rushing through the story, which includes a subplot about a sidekick who betrays Fleming by leaking secrets and is in turn betrayed by him when he sleeps with his girlfriend then winds up pushed over a cliff by his evil American associate, the hero seems completely cracked, with more than his fair share of guilt complexes, whereas Reilly – coming off a streak of interesting performances, notably in Mrs Henderson Presents – isn't convincing as a whitecoated brainbox or the alien being (more like Tilda Swinton in Friendship's Death than Julie Christie or Susan Hampshire in the original Andromeda serials). It's a cramped production, with murky exteriors and modish out-of-focus or gloomy turquoise-lit interiors and jittery, shifty camerawork that still doesn't disguise the fact that it boils down to a lot of folks standing around computer terminals arguing earnestly or spouting New Scientist infodump.
KIM NEWMAN

First published in this form here.

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