Directed by Robert Wise
Written by Nelson Gidding from a novel by Michael Crichton
1971/US
IMDb page
First viewing/Netflix rental
Dr. Mark Hall: Most of them died instantly, but a few had time to go quietly nuts.
A wordy, but visually impressive, movie about a deadly organism from outer space. Turns out fact is scarier than fiction.
A satellite returns to Earth and the inhabitants of a nearby town all drop dead (literally in their tracks). That is all but an aging wino with an ulcer and a perpetually squalling six-month-old baby. A team of scientists (Arthur Hill, David Wayne, Kate Reid and James Olson) are all summoned immediately to the massive and strictly hush-hush Wildfire Laboratory to try to identify and defeat the killer.
I hope it is not too much of a spoiler to reveal that we are dealing with a crystalline organism, which may be an intelligent alien being. The story is devoted to the methodical efforts of the scientists to understand how the organism works, how it spreads and how to defuse it. They also have to worry about the lab self-destructing if they are unsuccessful.
If I have to pick between an alien plague that is taken seriously and the current situation in my homeland where a real-life deadly, but containable, virus is made the subject of politics and virtually ignored or derided by a sizable chunk of the population, I know which one I would choose. Would that life could resemble art.
As a movie, this is a little talkier than I would prefer but the effects and the settings are amazing. Considering this was done before CGI makes it even more spectacular. Wise does his usual competent job and even tries out a few of the New Hollywood’s tricks.
The Andromeda Strain was nominated for Academy Awards in the categories of Best Art Direction-Set Decoration and Best Film Editing.
Yes, this was a lot better than I expected. I picked this one mostly for the Corona analogy, but it could actually stand on its own.
How are people faring around you, Bea? Can you hold the virus at bay?
Have you seen Panic in the Streets? There’s a great epidemic movie. Richard Widmark, Jack Palance, Zero Mostel. Directed by Elia Kazan. A film noir.
Our county’s positivity rate finally went below 5% for long enough for businesses to open up again to some degree. I don’t know how my husband and I could be safer. We never go to gatherings and rarely go out at all. And we religiously mask up. I think it’s going to be a very, very trying winter all over the USA. How about Denmark?
Well, there has been a surge here and Danes are now blacklisted in most of the world. It does seem to have been stabilized though. Apparently, it was driven by young people and curbing their access to party seems to be doing the job without closing down everything else. Anyway, we are back to living the isolated life again not seeing anybody and hardly going anywhere. Autumn is upon us with crap weather so the forest hikes that kept us going in the spring are less of an option now.
Hopefully, Danish young people are more obedient than American young people! I feel sorry for the college students. Asking an 18-year-old who is living away from home for the first time not to party seems like a hopeless task.
The heat might be easing up here. It’s been a record year for heat all over the state. And dry brush means forest fires. My friend who lives up North but not what you would call near any of the fires says that the air in her town is yellow and smells like smoke.
Wonderfully made – not the most action-packed, but it was attempting to show what a situation like that would really be like. (I’m slightly biased because IMO the book was actually Crichton’s best.) And it has a great assembling-the-team sequence that is still a stand-out.
One interesting change from the book – apart from making one of the doctors a woman, which is a serious improvement – is that they actually reverse the colour scheme. Each floor has a different colour scheme, due to the colour’s calming effect on human psychology – but in the book they’re the other way round!
I liked the laboratory sets best. Would that real world diseases were so cooperative as the organism in this movie!