The team also benefits from the casting of four comparative unknowns – Arthur Hill, James Olson, David Wayne, and Kate Reid – making it easier to see the characters without popular stars in the way. Michael Crichton always had a gift for assembling pop science into dialogue that easily ‘talked the talk’ – even if its accuracy tended to stumble when observed too closely. They are professional, highly capable, and generally sound very convincing when discussing the crisis. The team of scientists enlisted to handle the threat bring with them a surprisingly strong sense of authenticity. The film’s opening act is a deeply unnerving one as an entire town is found lying dead on the street and in their homes the only survivors a rambling alcoholic and a crying baby. The Andromeda Strain really does feel relevant to today’s real-life pandemic, representing as it does an uncontrolled outbreak of a new and unknown virus. The US military brings an emergency plan into effect, pulling four scientists out of their homes late in the evening and transporting them to an underground facility in the desert: the ultimate in secure laboratories. Within minutes this initial team is dead as well. They find the entire town dead killed by an unknown lethal pathogen collected by the satellite while in the Earth’s orbit. When a government satellite crashes into a small New Mexico town, a team is dispatched for retrieval.
It focuses on scientists doing their jobs, running against the clock to crack the nature of the threat and to find a cure for it. Based on the Michael Crichton novel of the same name, it foreshadowed not only the boom in similar Crichton adaptations two decades later but also an entire genre of similar virus-affected thrillers. It seems either fitting, then – or perhaps deeply inappropriate – to revisit Robert Wise’s 1971 science fiction thriller The Andromeda Strain. The Andromeda Strain (RottenTomatoes.2020 has been one hell of a year, with the world facing an ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
The strain is given the code name Andromeda. The end credits for this film just list the cast over the course of several seconds and no music plays. Doesn't she realize she would die if she doesn't help him? Oh, so did she miss the one with "No Growth." It's explained later.
Pretty interesting at the one hour and thirty minute mark. I wonder how they're trained to play dead.Īpparently some people had time to kill themselves.
This is the outer epithelial layers of your skin that have been burned away." Both gross and awesome. "You may notice a fine white ash on your body. Interesting: the choice to stop the nuclear explosion. Mark Hall (James Olson) with, as informed by the computer, a layer of his skin burned away. I didn't realize this film was so old: 1971. "Now wait a minute, that's not what they told me. Ruth Leavitt (Kate Reid) head on out to the research facility. Despite the movie being made over forty years ago, I still find it interesting to watch.ĭr. In addition to the story, I would also compliment the movie for its portrayal of the future. While The Andromeda Strain started incredibly slowly, it picked up and got exciting about a quarter of the way into the movie - when the scientists begin making more deductions about the mysterious infection.