Defense Department satellite, part of a program called Project Scoop, plunges to Earth in
the very small town of Piedmont, N.M. When its contents are exposed to air, they cause instantaneous death for most of the village's threescore inhabitants, who are later found fallen in their tracks, with their blood transformed to a dry red powder. Dr. Jeremy Stone (Arthur Hill) and Dr. Mark Hall (James Hall), who investigate the site wearing airtight isolation suits, find indications that some of the inhabitants took longer to die than others. One old woman found time to write a suicide note before hanging herself, while another resident has somehow managed to hold his own head under water long enough to drown himself in a bathtub.
The two scientists are about to lift off in their helicopter when they discover an even more
important clue: a crying baby, still lying in its crib. Seconds afterward they are confronted by a traumatized old man who also survived the disaster. Clearly, these two people hold the key to unlocking the secret of the contagion.
Soon joined by Dr. Charles Dutton (David Wayne) and Dr. Ruth Leavitt (Kate Reid), the scientists convene at a secret base in Nevada, where they undergo arduous decontamination procedures while descending to the fifth level of the state-of-the-art research center, where they must isolate and neutralize the growing alien infection before it kills again. But unknown to them, the simplest of all mechanical errors has cut off their communications with the outside world ... and Dr. Leavitt harbors a secret medical condition of her very own.
As the newly dubbed Andromeda strain is revealed as a crystalline form of life, the researchers are horrified by the realization that nuking the bug is just a loud way of encouraging it to become even nastier. Unfortunately, that's just how the facility has been programmed to deal with the threat of contamination. And the warning klaxons start to sound ...
A cold, dispassionate horror
The film version of The Andromeda Strain begins with a blurb to the effect that these events are based on actual events which are about to be revealed by the declassification of previously top-secret documents. This protestation of truth is just as phony as the similar pronouncements that begin other fictional films, from Plan Nine from Outer Space to
Fargo, but it does enhance the film's spell, since the drama is pitched as a near-documentary re-creation of a genuine crisis, dramatized with only minimal attention to the personal lives of its protagonists. What little we see, including a scene of Stone's wife protesting while Army officers take him away to deal with the crisis, is annoying and could have been jettisoned without any damage to the film's structure. With the exception of a much-too-conventional climax—which turns one of the scientists into a heroic lead defying lasers and knockout gas as he races to disarm a ticking nuclear clock—the focus is on the
procedures that lead this team of medical professionals from the enigma at the story's heart to
the solution that prevents the government from making the situation infinitely worse.
Science geeks have quibbled over the accuracy of the scientific procedures as shown, but in a genre where the crack engineers of the Enterprise can solve any problem by coming up with a new subatomic particle by the third act, the result certainly feels unusually real. About half the film is over before the scientists have even finished decontamination procedures necessary to get into the lab. Even the mechanical error that almost dooms us all (a paper jam in a printer that prevents the scientists from getting critical information on a timely basis) has the perverse ring of reality. As for the early scenes, involving the discovery of the terrible death toll in Piedmont, they're filmed with a cold, dispassionate eye, which if anything makes the horror of the situation ever more immediate. Director Robert Wise makes liberal use of stills and split-screens, showing us the faces and hinting at the characters of the dead—and stumbling only once, to modern eyes, when he pays special attention to the beautiful, bare-breasted corpse who stars in the movie's only moment of jarring cheesecake. (The slow zoom at the end of that shot is cut off before it can get too disgusting, but let's be honest here: She may be beautiful, but she's also supposed to be dead. Shame on anybody whose fantasies were aroused.)
Arthur Hill is essentially Mr. Exposition, explaining everything at a length that might test
the patience of longtime science fiction fans, but which made this still-challenging film accessible to popular audiences of the time. Kate Reid keeps things human with her frequent sarcastic asides. The dated moments go beyond rotary phones and the references to kids dropping out, to gosh-wow revelations of then-cutting-edge technology like touch-sensitive screens on computer monitors.
The film no longer possesses the searing intensity its ads promised during its initial release, but it remains well-made brain candy: one of the smartest science-fiction films ever made.
Ridley Scott is working on a 2005 remake.
Still alive as of this writing, Robert Wise, who has directed only three times in the past 25 years, remains a genuine icon of film history, with a resume going all the way back to 1934. He was the editor of Citizen Kane (1941) and the director of West Side Story (1961), among many other award-quality classics. More to the point, in this context, his resume in genre film is particularly rich: He edited the classic The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941) and directed Curse of the Cat People (1944), The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), The Haunting (1963), this film (1971), Audrey Rose (1977) and Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979).
