Subject: Retrospective: Andromeda Strain, The (1971)

From: Paul McElligott <[email-masked]>
Date: 21 Jul 1999 06:02:02 GMT

The Andromeda Strain

A Retrospective

Starring: Arthur Hill (Dr. Jeremy Stone), David Wayne (Dr. Charles
Dutton), James Olson (Dr. Mark Hall), Kate Reid (Dr. Ruth Leavitt).  
Produced and Directed by Robert Wise.

The Andromeda Strain is the greatest science fiction film ever made.  I
know that is very sweeping statement, so I'll qualify it by adding that
The Andromeda Strain is one of the few films made that genuinely deserve
the label of "science fiction," stories in which speculative science is
at the core of the plot.

2001: A Space Odyssey is probably a better film, but it really only
qualifies as science fiction if you consider metaphysics to be a
science.  Most all other films we normally classify as science fiction,
or SF, are really just fantasy, action or horror stories set in a
futuristic setting.

The Andromeda Strain starts out with two soldiers in a high-tech (for
1970) van looking for a crashed satellite in a tiny New Mexico town. 
Something bad happens to them.  Pictures from a reconnaissance plane
show a shocking sight.   Apparently everyone in the town is dead.  The
authorities call a "Wildfire Alert," summoning four scientists, all but
one of them somewhat reluctant, to a super-secret underground germ
warfare laboratory in Nevada.  Two of scientists, Stone and Hall, fly
directly to the town in space suits and find a town where almost every
single resident literally dropped in their tracks, their blood turned to
powder in their veins.  Some went insane before they died and two of
them, a baby and an old wino, are miraculously still alive.  They take
the survivors and the satellite back to the lab, where Stone pressures
the White House to call up a "Directive 712," an executive order to
cauterize the area around the town with a nuclear bomb.

What they find on the satellite when they get back to the lab is
Andromeda, an organism that defies all the normal rules of Earth-like
life and mutates as it grows.  Their only hope to cure it is to find out
what a perfectly healthy baby boy has in common with an old derelict. 
What they find out is that organism feeds directly on energy and that
detonating the A-bomb over the town would only spread it across the
entire planet.  They barely call off the bombing in time.

But then the organism mutates into something that threatens to eat
through the labs defenses and break out.  This triggers the lab's
last-ditch defense mechanism, an atomic bomb.

To those raised on the brainless action fare that pollutes movie
theaters these days, The Andromeda Strain will probably seem
interminably slow.  Much of the film is a lot of people standing around
looking at video screens and computer readouts.  But what the characters
see on those screens ratchets up the tension with every turn of the
screw.  The performances are universally fine, with the actors keeping
things low-key and restrained, just like scientists.

To me, the real appeal of this film is the fact that it shows scientists
acting like scientists and makes it seem exciting.  We follow the logic
of their deduction step by methodical step, puzzling like they do every
time Andromeda behaves in a way we don't expect.

This film is only available on wide screen on DVD and that is the way to
see it.  It was originally rated G when first released but it now
carries the PG rating, mostly for very mild nudity and one scene in
which a body's wrist is slashed, spilling its powdered blood.

Rating 9 out of 10 wild fires 

-- 
Paul McElligott
http://home.earthlink.net/~plmcelligott
"Subvert the dominant paradigm"