A sometimes lumpy tale that relies for its thrills on the unfolding of a technical enigma, The Andromeda Strain can at least claim to have more than silly gimmicks on its agenda. As in the convincing source book, following the four scientist heroes into a Sherlock Holmes mystery has its own rewards, and minor drawbacks. Yet, it's a serious attempt at intelligent Science Fiction, a welcome rarity.

Relentlessly literal, the tale spends its first hour rounding up its quartet of researchers and getting them to the bottom level of a secret lab in the Nevada desert. Following up on the tech-happy 2001, most of the interest is in the hardware itself - the color-coded levels of the lab, each more clean than the next, the up-to-the-minute (or fancifully extrapolated) equipment the scientists use. As envisioned by crack production designer Boris Leven, most of these look terrific, if a bit dated now - Star Trek has overdone the spacey corridor look, and trying to work in a fire-engine red environment would drive people crazy.

On the positive side, the attempts to humanize the proceedings are fairly successful. The military men and politicians carry just as much procedural exposition as do the lead characters, but are nicely cast and distinguished; nurse Paula Kelly is charming, and the drunken survivor of the town, George Mitchell, does a nice spin on the jolly drunk everyone remembers from Them!, right down to trying to bargain for booze and cigarettes. His comic asides into the tv monitors are a welcome respite from the sober tension of the rest of the story.

The four leads have a tougher problem, as they're asked to attack the contagion problem with cold calculation, and still present entertainingly individualistic personalities. As the old crank on the payroll, David Wayne has the lightest exposition burden, and comes off the best. Faux-hardboiled Kate Reid carries most of the comedy with her smart remarks, but ends up letting the team down with her epilepsy problem. Another actor makes excuses for her by citing the non-disclosure of her ailment as due to prejudice and fear, but the fact is, Kate's main plot contribution is to jeopardize the mission. James Olson and Arthur Hill are better than the film's detractors say they are, but poor Hill's expository responsibilities prevent him from doing much more than explaining things non-stop to the other characters. The moment where Olson misunderstands the purpose of his red nuclear key ("No, no, you don't set off anything - all you can do is stop it!") is unintentionally ironic - one hopes the boys behind our nuclear arsenal have a better understanding of their duty.

The two doctors rescue an inexplicably living baby and take him to the lab, which is Crichton's best plot gimmick - audiences with which I saw The Andromeda Strain in 1971 couldn't have cared less about 64 dead Nevadans, and probably weren't really worried about the world being depopulated by a Space Germ. But one cute, crying baby grabbed their emotions and brought the jeopardy down to the elemental level.

When people call The Andromeda Strain Crichton's best work, they must be referring to his ingenious use of real medical knowledge to lend the story an air of authenticity. That quality carries over to the film, wedded to concepts baldly lifted (and often improved upon) from classic-era Sci Fi movies. I mentioned Them! and On the Beach, but the biggest debt is to the Quatermass films, two of which involve biological colonization from Outer Space. There's also a generous lift from the humble Kronos. Exactly as in the old movie about the tinkertoy robot from space, the heroes demand that the government nuke the Piedmont location, and then hastily reverse themselves when they find out that Andromeda 'feeds on energy'. Several dialogue lines are practically a direct quote from Kronos.

What in this instance saves the world from calamity, is the same kind of low-tech snafu that threatened it in Fail-Safe, that famous WW3 shocker that put the blame for armageddon on machines instead of people. In Andromeda, the story momentarily breaks into an odd audio flash-forward to let us hear two generals discussing what caused the Project Wildfire communications breakdown. I always ask people about that scene, and they tell me it confused them. It confused me, because the calm 'voices from the future' gave away the fact that the world will not be destroyed.

Project Wildfire is a more impressive version of the super-secret desert labs seen in Sci Fi films from Gog onward. The Satan Bug had a similar facility that was in fact a germ warfare development station, one with really pitiful security. Just as movies like Destination Moon came right out with the statement that American space exploration was really a military issue, Crichton has one of his scientists make the blunt accusation that the whole Wildfire Project is a hoax, that Project Scoop's mission was to find new biological weapons in space. It's a really good idea for Crichton to include, even it's the most paranoid of the scientists who brings it up. The whole issue was dropped for a decade, until Alien sneaked in the mostly-ignored subtext that Earth weapons researchers might actually be searching for space monsters to convert to military purposes.

The computers in The Andromeda Strain are really, really efficient for 1970, or 2003, for that matter. Their instant feedback analysis of each situation is remarkable. What we never see is how the instant data is collected and digitized, whether it involves measuring growth on petrie dishes, or the instant analysis of blood. No matter what the question, our dauntless heroes plink a few keys on a keyboard, and the facts they want simply leap up at them. Is The Andromeda Strain the dawn of the lazy writer-brilliant computer syndrome? The scientists here pluck info out of the air as nonchalantly as do the spacemen in Star Trek.

The fact that audiences didn't recoil at the illogic of certain scenes probably says a lot about the film's basic effectiveness. The staff of Project Wildfire, presumably trained and screened to the nth degree, balk like peasants frightened by the plague at the possibility that Kate Reid might carry the Andromeda germ. It's not very flattering - are they just clockwatching civil servants? At least they're not a bunch of lily-livered crybabies, like the astronauts in the now-hilarious Marooned.

The Andromeda organism is cleverly described as a lifeform based on an alien crystalline structure. After wiping out Piedmont, it apparently mutates to a form that no longer coagulates blood, but instead dissolves human flesh and certain similarly structured plastics - reducing a jet pilot and his polychron oxygen mask to bones and some metal fittings. Just being in our environment made the strain mutate, we're meant to understand. It appears that when David Wayne is later exposed, he is spared because the virus specimen in the lab has mutated to Andromeda 2.0 as well. It attacks the polychron plastic of the lab's isolation seals, dissolving then as it did the pilot's mask. But what about Andromeda 2.0's human flesh-eating quality? Wayne looks pretty untouched to me.

Andromeda's post-mortem is also a bit on the pat side - if this thing spontaneously mutates from a deadly form to a deadlier form, which version is drifting into the Pacific, to be neutralized by the acidic sea water? (A gag, by the way, associated with the most simple-minded monster movies, like Day of the Triffids.) How do we know it won't mutate again, perhaps gaining a tolerance to wider range of Ph? Perhaps Liz, the educated Australian lady behind the science-savvy And You Call Yourself a Scientist! site has the facts to explain all this to the ignorant Savant.

Other plot gripes are less critical, but point up some of Crichton's not-fully developed story skills. Having the lab be unfinished, so that the Odd Man Out Olsen is nowhere near a disarm station when the nuclear destruct sequence starts, is fairly defensible, even though it provides a convenient crisis for the climax.

But using the paper wedge gimmick to conveniently put the whole lab out of contact with Washington, is a pretty desperate gimmick. Even if the doofus in the radio room didn't hear a bell, he'd certainly hear and see the reams of teletype communication spilling out onto the floor. Hasn't anyone heard of backup systems?

Universal and Robert Wise are to be commended for their attempt at quality Sci Fi so soon after 2001. Universal buried an equally visionary but politically more interesting film called Colossus - the Forbin Project for almost two years, a big commercial mistake considering how ready audiences were for its perfect a post - 2001 computer menace. The Andromeda Strain avoids a political context, but certainly has a martial-law flavor. The armed troops that pick up the scientists, and block their relatives' phone calls, were laughed at approvingly by audiences back in 1971 - those government spies didn't mess around with civil liberties, man. It all now seems rather sinister. Perhaps the government, when it exhausts other sources of fear, will tell us they're suspending our rights to protect us from germs from space ...

Universal's deluxe disc of The Andromeda Strain belies its low price. The transfer is sharp and brilliant, greatly enhancing the enjoyment of this movie's designs - the aluminum rooms and shiny white lab instruments. The audio is in 5.1 only, and there are English and Spanish subtitles. I'm stealing the gag, but the disc cover art looks like something from a Dianetics pocketbook. A text blurb predictably exploits the Crichton-Jurassic Park connection.

The docu is a thorough tour through the making of the film, guided by Robert Wise and Nelson Gidding. Wise hasn't much to say except the old 'it's not Science Fiction but Science Fact' nonsense none of us need to hear. But his memory of the details is pretty good. Gidding applauds Crichton, and Crichton is on hand to volunteer stories of his first film deal. Douglas Trumbull sketches the details of his and Jamie Shourt's brilliantly-achieved effects. They used custom-created hi-res television screens in ways that seem to predict concepts later developed to record computer images onto film. It was Trumbull's entry into effects as they were done in the real industry (not the dream-factory, sky-is-the-limit situation of 2001), and he acknowledges his admiration for the experts who preceded him. He named one of his daughters Andromeda after this movie, by the way.

I myself am not sure where the line should be drawn with the killing of living things for movies, as we do it so much everywhere else in daily life.  ⁵

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