Ahhh, a BBC film! Doesn't it make you feel all warm and fuzzy just thinking about it? What we have here, however, is a somewhat cold fish. A for Andromeda suffers from a number of flaws which prevent it from being what it's intended to be: a study of the dilemmas surrounding the creation of artificial life.

Firstly the structure is poorly conceived. Too much time is spent setting the scene and building up to the appearance of Andromeda. There's also a completely pointless subplot involving espionage that wastes valuable time. The result of this is that the important part of the story - what happens after the appearance of Andromeda - is crammed into the last 35 minutes.

Then there's the underfunding. There are some creaky effects here, notably the supercomputer, which resembles a huge disco ball. The top secret lab looks like a rundown 1960s comprehensive school. And when the MOD swoop in to take control they do so with just four men. Hmnn, I think I detect a somewhat… more »

Ahhh, a BBC film! Doesn't it make you feel all warm and fuzzy just thinking about it? What we have here, however, is a somewhat cold fish. A for Andromeda suffers from a number of flaws which prevent it from being what it's intended to be: a study of the dilemmas surrounding the creation of artificial life.

Firstly the structure is poorly conceived. Too much time is spent setting the scene and building up to the appearance of Andromeda. There's also a completely pointless subplot involving espionage that wastes valuable time. The result of this is that the important part of the story - what happens after the appearance of Andromeda - is crammed into the last 35 minutes.

Then there's the underfunding. There are some creaky effects here, notably the supercomputer, which resembles a huge disco ball. The top secret lab looks like a rundown 1960s comprehensive school. And when the MOD swoop in to take control they do so with just four men. Hmnn, I think I detect a somewhat half-hearted commitment to this project from the suits at the BBC.

Thirdly, we have some pretty weak characters speaking some rather silly dialogue. The four scientists earnestly recite lots of lengthy words while tapping furiously at their keyboards (they have to enter an awful lot of very long binary numbers for some reason). There's also some pretty clumsy symbolism going on here, but I won't go into that.

But what convinced me least was Andromeda's epiphany. Here is a super-intelligent life form with an important purpose programmed into her and it takes all of 90 seconds for her to do a complete 180. This would have been more convincing if they had time to explore the dilemma she suddenly finds herself facing.

Despite all of the above I still quite enjoyed this film. What redeems it, to some extent, is the style in which it's filmed. It shifts nicely from faux docudrama to dreamlike serenity, lulling the viewer into believing that there might be more here than meets the eye, even though there isn't. And the spare, ethereal soundtrack serves nicely to reinforce this illusion.

The original BBC series was before my time so I can't comment on that. I suspect, however, that this doesn't compare terribly well.