As reported a couple weeks ago (including here at io9), Tony Scott has confirmed that he and his brother/producing partner Ridley are going ahead with an Alien prequel. Scott said Carl Erik Rinsch, the commercial director who made the robot-filled Saturn ad below, would make his feature debut as the movie's director.

Entertainment Weekly, however, reports that 20th Century Fox isn't interested in the project unless Ridley, who directed the original Alien 30 years ago, helms the new one as well. Complicating matters is the notion that Rinsch is (according to EW) dating Ridley's daughter, Jordan. (Like everyone else in the Scott family, she's also a director of TV ads.) Is that what Tony Scott meant when he said handing the movie to Rinsch was giving it over to "one of the family"?

Show of hands: Who wants to see Scott return to direct the franchise he created? Who has watched Rinsch's work and thinks he's just the fresh blood needed to revitalize the series, after the ignominy of the later sequels and the Alien vs. Predator titles? Who's afraid that a power struggle between Fox and the Scotts is going to scuttle the project altogeher? And who wishes they'd just leave well enough alone and not try to fix what ain't broke?

A&E's version of Andromeda flails around like a coked-up otter, especially in the first half hour or so. There's a satellite! And it crashes! And two pesky teens take it into a small town, where everyone dies horribly, much like you'd expect — and then, with no warning, we're suddenly lurched into trying to humanize the series' entire cast, in perfunctory, throwaway scenes.

Benjamin Bratt from Law And Order has a crazy ex and a teenage son with a moped. He wants moped boy to go stay with his sister. What will happen to moped boy? And some guy is a right-wing jerk, but it's okay because we later find out he's gay. But Will from Will And Grace is not gay, but is a hard-driving reporter with a substance abuse problem. Moped Boy is angry! We also meet the president of the United States, who drawls about how you have to throw the dice when you're hunting possum, because otherwise you'll be holding 'em when you want to be folding 'em. And Benjamin Bratt is secretly in love with one of his fellow epidemiologists, but Moped Boy thinks Benjamin Bratt is a know-it-all.

Actually, we see a lot of Moped Boy in the first half hour of the first episode, but then he's pretty much never seen again. He's symptomatic of the show's problem, which is that it has a humongous cast of characters — way more than the original novel or Robert Wise movie — and they're all completely one-dimensional, except for the movie's lurching stabs at making them compelling. By the time we get back to the virus killing everybody, we've sort of lost the thread thinking about Moped Boy and his failure to realize that Benjamin Bratt really does know everything. I had started to think Moped Boy was a major character, and wondered where he had gone.

So yeah, the new series follows the book and the movie — to some extent. There's an alien virus on that thar crashed satellite, and it's nothing like anything we've seen before. And it causes people to die instantly from blood clotting, or else (in a handful of cases) to go berzerk. And our five scientists go into a super-fancy underground bunker to figure out how to stop it.

But the new version has to get fancy, throwing in every bit of new tech you can think of — the virus comes down wrapped in a nanotech shield of "Bucky Balls" — and the super-mutating virus is like "stem cells" because it can transform itself and adapt to anything. And there's a whole complicated backstory about how the virus came from a wormhole — and maybe it came from the future! — because the army has a secret ebil project, Project Scoop, that Will from Will and Grace is investigating. It gets more and more complicated — the Bucky Balls are a code from the future — and we leave behind a lot of the classic simplicity of the book and 1971 movie.

That's the other problem with this version of Andromeda — the virus is built up to be such an incredible super-organism that mutates like five or six times (instead of, I think, three times in the book) and infects birds and rats. About three hours in, I started to wonder why everybody wasn't dead yet. Will from Will and Grace was running around the contagion zone for hours and hours, including one scene where he prays, and no infected birds or airborne radioactive strains do away with him. (We were hoping after a while.) Maybe Will and Moped Boy will get caught in a disaster together!

Yet for all that, we did enjoy the new miniseries. And parts of it were fun to watch while tipsy from all those Wiscon parties. Plus there's very little else to watch on TV right now, until the Lost finale and the return of Sci Fi's Friday night lineup. Bottom line: If you think of it as "Mansquito with an A-list cast" (and the cast did a great job with what they were given) then you'll probably enjoy it a lot. Just don't compare it too much to Michael Crichton's best novel, or Robert Wise's taut medical thriller.

Apparently star Andre Braugher isn't a big fan of the novel, "Crichton's book doesn't hold up to the test of time and so not much happens. When you go back to 1968 and read that book it's anti-climactic, period, so this is a re-telling of the story with the same premise." Let's hope fans of the novel aren't rankled too much by that. As long as he's nitpicking, he might as well say that the 1971 film based on the same novel doesn't hold up that well either. What's going to make their version so much better?

He's very stingy with the details, and basically only tells us that he's playing the military man who is brought in to deal with the situation, while Benjamin Bratt plays the "hot-headed scientist" who is trying to track down the virus. Does Benjamin Bratt have any roles where he isn't hot-headed? According to Braugher, the film will have some elements of Sphere in it (please dear god, let him mean the novel and not the awful movie version), and promises that the virus won't be benign as it is in the novel, but will be "malignant and on the loose."

Hear that folks? It's another "rampant virus on the loose" sci fi tale. Steel yourselves, and think about investing in a hazmat suit.

Braugher on Strain [Bloody Disgusting]