Remaking the techno thriller “The Andromeda Strain” might’ve seemed like a brilliant idea over some pan-seared-this or vinaigrette-that Hollywood film-exec lunch.

The source material, pre-“Jurassic Park” Michael Crichton’s debut novel, was a bestseller, and Robert Wise’s well-regarded 1971 movie adaptation would seem to be begging for an update as it’s as quaint as “Laugh-In” reruns. And the story – about an alien virus that spreads after a satellite crash-lands in a small town – still taps into our fears of terrorism, invasion, mass illness and civil breakdown. Update it with a bit more political paranoia, media subterfuge and relationship drama and, voila, ratings gold.

Or so A&E hopes with its two-night miniseries revamp of “The Andromeda Strain,” which begins at 8 p.m. today and concludes Tuesday night (on Sunflower Broadband Channel 47). Unfortunately, this production – overseen by film directors and brothers Ridley and Tony Scott – ramps up the cheesiness and soap-opera hysterics along with the improved special effects. The result is that the tension and suspense that made the original’s climax such a nail-biter is reduced to a silly stunt that doesn’t justify the investment of two night’s worth of TV viewing.

The basic bones of the plot remain unchanged: After the entire population of a remote Western town (Utah here, New Mexico in the original) is wiped out after a failed satellite’s fall back to Earth, Army biochemical research officer General George Mancheck (Andre Braugher) taps brilliant epidemiologist Jeremy Stone (Benjamin Bratt) to head up a team to find out what’s going on.

He corrals virologist Bill Keene (Ricky Schroder), surgeon Angela Noyce (Christa Miller), epileptic microbiologist Tsi Chou (Daniel Dae Kim) and pathologist Charlene Barton (Viola Davis) into a secluded government-run lab, dubbed Wildfire, to find the antidote to the killer virus before it can spread across the U.S.

Watching the original felt like being plunged into a pressure cooker, because the film mostly stayed within Wildfire’s claustrophobic confines as the minutes counted down to possible total annihilation. But the Scotts, along with director Mikael Salomon and writer Robert Schenkkan, insist on opening up the story to life beyond Wildfire.

Now, Stone is saddled with a failed marriage and a brooding (is there any other variety?) teenage son. Plus, he’s got some sort of professional relationship with muckraking but drug-addicted TV journalist Jack Nash (Eric McCormack), who escapes rehab and defies the media blackout to report about the strange activities in the Utah wilderness. Meanwhile, some operatives of dubious motives intercept Barton’s husband and children as they try to flee the country.

All of this serves to just make “The Andromeda Strain” more bloated, action-based and TV-movie generic than the dialog-heavy and rather static, science-based chiller that version 1.0 was. The producers probably gambled correctly that today’s audiences, remotes at the ready, aren’t going to sit through something as talky as the first “Strain,” no matter how great the pay-off.

But all they came up with are cliches. Back to the commissary, boys.