by Ryan Silberstein, Managing Editor, The Red Herring

After I first became aware of Michael Critchon via Jurassic Park and my love for dinosaurs, I devoured many of his novels in my middle school years: Congo, Sphere, Eaters of the Dead, Airframe, and I remember waiting for my mom to finish Timeline so I could read the hardcover after her. When I got to my freshman year biology class, Mr. Donahue had assigned us a novel outside of our textbook, which was odd, but it was also a Crichton I hadn’t read before, The Andromeda Strain. Seeing my enthusiasm for the book and this film, which we watched as a class after reading, he also recommended to  me the medial science-based thrillers of Robin Cook, which I eagerly devoured.

Aside from films like Side Effects, Flatliners, and Coma (directed by Crichton as an adaptation of a Cook novel!), medical thrillers at the movies often mean outbreak movies. Outbreak, Contagion, The Crazies, and 12 Monkeys are just a few of the non-zombie films in this subgenre, but Robert Wise’s adaptation of The Andromeda Strain stands apart from maybe all but Contagion, spending most of its time as a process movie. We get enough of a glimpse of the death that the mysterious Andromeda is causing to set the stakes for the film, but most of the book and the film focuses on the team of scientists acting out the scientific method. They hypothesize, gather data, and conduct experiments. They try to find the connections between dissimilar things (in this case an old alcohol addict and a crying baby). 

That’s the main reason my high school biology teacher assigned us this story. If approached as a thriller, The Andromeda Strain could seem maddeningly slow. These scientists are investigating a lethal outbreak of an unknown pathogen! Where are the helicopters, the mass panic? But that’s how science often is. While there is a sort of ticking clock, the thinking and experimentation are allowed to unfold in a pace that doesn’t seem hurried at all. It makes sense that Wise was tapped later to direct Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which has a similar mystery for its plot. But where his Trek suffers from too many people reacting in awe to incomprehensible things on screens, Strain is a bit more human-level. It’s not just the threat to human lives, but these scientists are also battling their own egos and assumptions while reckoning with this unknown organism. 

In the years since freshman biology, what has made The Andromeda Strain stay with me is the production design. Boris Leven, William H. Tuntke, and Ruby R. Levitt were nominated for an Academy Award for Best Art Direction (they lost to Nicholas and Alexandra) and rightly so. Likely influenced by Ken Adam’s work on Dr. Strangelove and the Connery-era Bond films from a few years earlier, here the plethora of screens, buttons, and scientific equipment are doing their best not to interrupt the circular shape of Wildfire. Everything about these rooms reinforce the sterile nature of the environment. There are few corners for dirt or dust to accumulate, and the characters’ solid color jumpsuits often seem to blend into the walls as this secret government facility threatens to swallow them up forever. The Andromeda Strain received a nicely resorted Blu-Ray from Arrow Video in 2019, which makes these details stand out even more. Gil Melle’s impressionistic electronic score also adds another layer of eeriness to the entire film, adding tension that might be lacking from the film’s pace. 

One thing that the film improves upon compared to the novel is changing the character of Dr. Leavitt to be female. Portrayed by Kate Reid, she is the most interesting character in the film. Retaining the character’s attribute of epilepsy into the film creates a “women in the workplace” theme that is absent from the novel, and complicates the “odd man hypothesis” even further. A running current through the film is around decision-making, and who among a given group would have the highest attunement to reason in a crisis. While the idea of it being an unmarried male is obviously bullshit, the presence of the self-destruct option makes Wildfire, the underground laboratory where most of the film takes place, even more of a sweatbox.

Straddling the line between medical procedural and Cold War panic film–with a dose of cosmic horror for good measure–The Andromeda Strain is still a fascinating and dense film, waiting for its notions about power and biology to be challenged.