![]() ![]() Only a man can make the right decision in a world-killing event?Ĭricton’s fiction was prescient enough to still be viable a half century later in this “how done-it” rather than “who done-it”. Though The Andromeda Strain is one of the more diverse movies of the era you’ll still find annoying misogyny, like the “Odd Man” hypothesis that bugged me when I was fourteen and bugs me now. Her lab assistant is a young Asian American woman, the Wildfire nurse is an African American woman, and the baby is Hispanic. While watching it for this review I was struck with how much she reminds me of a doctor/research scientist I got to know while in college. She’s a lot earthier than that, and has all of the funny lines. One of the scientists from the book was changed to an older woman, supposedly in a bid to add “tough minded maternalism” to the story. The director also doesn’t shy away from the painful to watch, like opening a man’s veins in close-up and lethal animal testing in the lab. Racy (for early 70s) shots of a man’s naked butt and a woman’s chest with no tricks to hide the nudity heightens the documentary feel with their matter-of-factness. Throughout the film Wise used unusual camera angles and super close shots to make everything feel a little “off” and accentuate how important the scientists’ frenzied research is to humankind’s survival. After the credits the film relies almost completely on ambient sound, and inside Wildfire the constant, nearly subsonic hum of the facility. I don’t know if the director simply wanted to use the Wildfire facility sounds as a musical leitmotif, or he really meant to put his Cold War era audience further on edge with unusual, “highly technical” sounds. The musically rendered science builds in frenzy and complexity and then stops at the beginning of the film. Title cards letting the viewer know this all Really Happened (it didn’t) (I think) followed by the opening credits are scored with an electronically mixed source music with elements of futuristic scientific sounds like dot matrix printers and heartbeat monitors. The novel by Michael Crichton, a master of blending popular fears of science and government secrecy into potent anxiety soups, was blended by director Robert Wise into something even scarier, beginning with the beautiful opening score. It was a scary place in a lot of American heads back then. Science, as always, was looked on suspiciously by most folks and during this time enormous steps forward were convincing not a few people that the “eggheads” were going to kill us all. At the same time, the Space Race that was also a part of the Cold War was testing people’s fear of the unknown, including worry about what the astronauts might inadvertently bring back to Earth. Fear of a nuclear holocaust was a real and constant tension, not helped by a growing public knowledge of just how sneaky governments – even ours – could be. and the Soviets had a lot of people on edge. Forty million people had died not thirty years before, leaving no one on the planet unaffected, and the covert and potentially world killing activities of the U.S. The Andromeda Strain appeared in the middle of the Cold War, which was the (mostly) non-shooting fallout of two surviving giants of World War II. After an examination of the town the action moves to a super-secret underground bio-research facility code named Wildfire (set in the middle of the nuclear testing area, now more popularly known at Area 51 – which you won’t find on Google Map). It got worse a few minutes later when we learned it’s a space bug that kills the town of Piedmont, New Mexico, which looks as arid as the surface of the Moon and which the government intends to sterilize with a nuclear bomb. ![]() The creepy began with an opening statement about the events being real and thanking the responsible government agency (fake) for their cooperation (the book even has fake bibliographic citations). Neither of us knew that the schlocky sci fi we expected would have us speechless in paranoid fear before very long. The Andromeda Strain is none of those things, but we thought it was when we turned the rabbit ears in the direction of that night’s film (yes, people, you couldn’t see movies every day on tv, and when you could there was only one movie, and only one time). I’ve loved movies for a very, very long time thanks to my dad, who shared my love of the bad, the cheesy, and the ridiculous. ![]() The filmmakers did NOT kill the monkey, so you can relax. ![]()
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