The Andromeda Strain (1971)

“Establishment gonna fall down and go boom.”

My wife has had a deep and long-standing fascination with failure. More specifically, she is intensely curious about points of no return - situations where, by accident, design or stupidity, things are discovered to be irrevocably hooped. Airplane crashes, business failures, doomed hiking expeditions, the death of the dinosaurs...she loves discovering what went wrong and, where applicable, who fucked up and how. The more detailed the story is, the better.

I think she’d get a huge kick out of The Andromeda Strain.

The Andromeda Strain was Michael Crichton’s seventh novel, but the first novel to be published under his own name (in 1969). It was also the first to be made into a movie. Crichton was a physician by training, and the clear trains of logic that run through his plots are a testament to his background as a scientist.

Sure, in much of his work the science isn’t all on point. It’s unlikely we’ll be cloning dinosaurs using frog DNA, for example, but The Andromeda Strain is special in this regard. So special that it was recognized by the Infectious Diseases Society of America in 2003 as the "most significant, scientifically accurate, and prototypic of all films of this [killer virus] genre ... it accurately details the appearance of a deadly agent, its impact, and the efforts at containing it, and, finally, the work-up on its identification and clarification on why certain persons are immune to it."

“There’s a fire, sir.”

What is also excellent about the screenplay and the book it’s based on are how well they depict the thought processes and actions of the different factions involved in the tale. The military acts, for better and worse, as you would expect, as do politicians and scientists. What is inspired, however, is how random events function to both frustrate progress and propel the plot forward. A little scrap of paper caught between a bell and a striker brings a multi million-dollar communication system to its knees, but that same scrap of paper quite conceivably ends up saving humanity from destruction. The very logical safety protocols that have been put in place in the Wildfire complex end up nearly destroying it. A minor medical condition causes a nearly disastrous panic. And it’s all so believable because these things happen every day. Lives can turn dramatically on the most trivial of events or chains of coincidence.

“Whatever killed them at Piedmont is still there, and still as potent as ever. “

The cast here is adroitly chosen, and the actors acquit themselves well. Arthur Hill, as Dr. Jeremy Stone, the team leader, is matter of fact and a strict adherer of protocol. James Olson (Dr. Mark Hall) is the youngest, and so, the most focused and angry. David Wayne is, as Dr. Charles Dutton, the friendly old guy who befriends and reins in Kate Reid (Dr. Ruth Leavitt), the cranky, middle-aged Woman Scientist™. Most of the cast are TV regulars, and it fits. A star would detract from the story. The actors aren’t the story, here. Neither, for that matter, are the characters themselves. This is just as well, as screenwriter Nelson Gidding’s dialog is not especially well crafted. If anything, the scientific and military gobbledygook is much more entertaining:

“Watchdog to Level 2, Sector D. You are Red Kappa Phoenix status.”

“Manchek. Order up a 7-12.”

Cool.

"Not for my alabaster body! I mean it, Stone! You can take your Body Analyzer and..."

The Andromeda Strain is a story of how things go wrong, and it is exact and precise in every detail. Every. Single. Detail. You’re going to learn about how to cleanse the human body of every extraneous organism, bacteria, or contaminant. You’re going to see how you’re supposed to sit in chairs while this is done. Exactly how. You’re going to see how to get into the special protective suits they use, and, just in case you can’t infer the opposite process, you’re going to see how to get out of them, too. You’re going to see how slowly the technology of the “future” operates in a Biosafety Level 4 environment. Not that it doesn’t make sense to move slow in those circumstances, but you’re going to see it, very clearly. A couple of times. Start to finish. In essence, this is a Michael Crichton movie before they learned how to make Michael Crichton movies. There’s no Mr. DNA animated character to help you along with the science here. You’re going to see it, real time. You’re going to watch the debate on how to scan the satellite and you’ll be there when they decide to scan it in the slowest possible way. You’ll see so many slides of pH test results that you’ll be on the verge of an epileptic fugue along with Dr. Leavitt, Woman Scientist™.

This is not “Show, don’t tell.” This is nowhere in the ballpark of “Show, don’t tell.”

And I don’t begrudge them a single minute.

It works. Somehow it works. And it’s not just because it scratches a very deeply ingrained OCD tendency in my neurochemistry. It’s how science works, and the timing of it is central to the whole plot of the movie. The fact that science is slow, that the government is slow, that the military is slow, and yet circumstances can converge in events where seconds make all the difference. This creates, in The Andromeda Strain, a high degree of tension and drama, especially in the final twenty minutes.

Which is exactly how it should be.

"The town is finished."

While the cast doesn’t necessarily distinguish itself in terms of accolades, there are Oscar winners and nominees all over the crew roster. Director Robert Wise himself won four Oscars and was nominated for three others. Director of Photography Richard H. Kline (of Soylent Green fame and a double Oscar nominee himself) deserves special mention, along with editors Stuart Gilmore and John W. Holmes (who both won Oscars for this film) for their incredibly imaginative camerawork and editing. There are so many notable shots in this film, particularly in the first thirty minutes. Dr. Stone and Hall’s walk through the town of Piedmont will make your skin crawl, and the use of tracking shots while simultaneously showing images of what the scientists are seeing while they look in the various windows of the town’s buildings is nothing short of ingenious. Even the initial credits are years ahead of their time - a constantly changing collage of documents, letters, figures, charts and graphs filled with evocative terms which generate curiosity in the viewer while also adding to the strong documentary feel. The arrangement of scenes also contributes to this. At one moment we’re watching events as they happen, while at other times we’re listening to testimony at committee hearings where a post-mortem of the crisis is being conducted.

Douglas Turnbull designed The Andromeda Strain’s groundbreaking special effects. It will come as no surprise to discover that he also was the effects lead in 2001: A Space Odyssey, but it’s equally interesting to see where he went later in his career. Silent Running, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Blade Runner - all significant films. Projection backgrounds were supplied by none other than John Dykstra, who, six years later, supervised photographic effects on Star Wars, which achieved a modest degree of success in theaters.

The Andromeda Strain is a quirky film. It may be an acquired taste, but it’s difficult for me to say because it hits me in all the right places. I remember being fascinated by it as a kid and watching it now I can see its influences clearly. I don’t know if Stephen King read the book, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he saw this movie before he wrote The Stand, and I’m damn sure the director of the 1994 miniseries did. Same with Outbreak, which got the overall pacing better to be sure. Still, this movie nailed that feeling first, that feeling of visiting a place where Death has ridden through at a gallop, casting a silent net, snaring hundreds of souls at a time.