THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN (1971) and me had an old score to settle
(or: How an erstwhile Michael Crichton fanatic finally got old enough to appreciate a 70's classic.)
- "The disease could spread into a worldwide epidemic."
- "It's because of rash statements like that the president doesn't trust scientists."
- "Warn the president it may already be too late."
What you are reading now is the culmination of years of previously unfinished business I've had with The Andromeda Strain.
You see, when I was a kid, I was a massive Crichton-head. Whether or not it was Jurassic Park that instigated this fandom of his work, and even in spite of being so young that I had the Calliope syndrome problem of mistakenly reading his surname as "Kritch-ton", I was quite obsessed with consuming anything and everything that Michael Crichton was involved in. The books he wrote, the films based on his books, the films he himself made, and the one TV show he created.
Of the latter, that was of course ER, which I watched on and off during its original run, before watching the entire series start-to-finish when it was re-run on Sky Atlantic.
Of the films he wrote and directed, and both of which I watched when they were on TCM because of his name's attachment to them, I saw Westworld, and his adaptation of Robin Cook's novel, Coma.
Of the films adapted from his novels, many of which lead me to getting the original books after watching the films, I naturally saw Spielberg's The Lost World: Jurassic Park, plus Richard Donner's Timeline, and Barry Levinson's Disclosure (which my mother only allowed me to watch because of its Crichton name tag, the story's tech-thriller trappings, and on the condition of me closing my eyes during any of the sex stuff).
Of the books he wrote, I read the film tie-in copy I owned of Jurassic Park (a far gorier, clinical, darker story in Crichton's hands than in Spielberg's adaptation), and from my secondary school library, I borrowed and read The Terminal Man (whose villainous main character I'd imagined would be played in a film perfectly by Kevin Spacey, before I later found out it'd already been made into a film in the 70's with George Segal, and long before Spacey made himself persona non grata), and - at admittedly perhaps too young an age to read such a book at only 11 or 12 - I borrowed and read Disclosure, after already seeing the movie version. (I distinctly remember the librarian lady, who was one of my favourite members of school staff I ever knew among any of my schools, raised her eyebrows when she saw the cover of Disclosure as I was getting it stamped to borrow, bemusedly reading out the front cover's Daily Mail pull quote calling the book "sexual dynamite", even though that characterisation of the book wasn't (completely) what I was in it for.)
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe27401ce-1646-465f-8f6a-cb9bbc91da59_1600x1600.jpeg)
Meanwhile, the books of his that I either owned or borrowed, and picked up but never finished, included The Great Train Robbery, Eaters of the Dead, Congo, Sphere, Rising Sun, Airframe, Timeline, Prey, State of Fear, and Next, his final novel before his death in 2008.
And then, there was the outlier of The Andromeda Strain.
The book was a library lend, and I only ever got about 50-something pages or so into it, before my attentions were drawn to other things. But those parts I did read were enough to recognise, when I eventually started watched the film version, that the film was incredibly faithful to the book.
A-ha! And thus we've come to the crux of the story! Because although this review may mark this as a first time viewing... this is very much not the first time I've tried to watch The Andromeda Strain.
For you see, when I got the film on DVD in the mid-2000's - bought off the strength of Michael Crichton's name, bought from my then-local Tesco supermarket, or perhaps the Virgin Megastore in Stevenage's town centre - I was looking forward to watching another exciting sci-fi thriller in the vein of the various other Crichton adaptations I'd grown up on. But, in what would amount to multiple attempts over multiple years to try and watch it from beginning to end, I just couldn't stay awake.
No matter how hard I tried to stay alert and see the film through without any lapses in consciousness, I was always lulled into slumber by the film's lack of action, minimal music, quietly ambient atmosphere, granularly detailed depictions of scientific procedures, and snail-crawl pacing. So all I'd ever see of the film would be the first 30-to-45 minutes or so, followed by prolonged sojourns into sudden sleep, with occasional reawakenings during the last 15-to-20 minutes, catching many snippets of contextless moments and images that I could never stay awake long enough to piece together into whatever the film was actually about.
Eventually, I gave up on trying, then at some point sold that DVD, and then close to two decades passed... until we reach today.
Why did I decide now was the time to give The Andromeda Strain another chance?
Because, dear reader, I was recently in the middle of a fixation to carry out a side-project that's been on the back burner for a few years. Said fixation was combing back through every episode of the Sam Esmail-directed first season of Homecoming, and compiling a definitive list of every piece of source music that Esmail and his music supervisors nabbed primarily from movies of the 70's and 80's. Many of the films whose music was Tarantino-ishly pilfered, in lieu of the standard/cheaper option of getting someone to do an original score (as would later happen with Season 2's hiring of composer Emile Mosseri), were classic sci-fi movies, horror movies, and especially conspiracy thriller movies of the sort that were so prevalent and brilliant during the eras of Watergate and the Cold War. We're talking Jerry Goldsmith's score for Capricorn One, Michael Small's scores for Marathon Man and Klute, David Shire's scores for The Conversation and All The President's Men, John Carpenter's scores for The Thing and The Fog, and - you guessed it! - Gil Mellé's score for The Andromeda Strain.
Hearing this awesomely strange, inventive, retro-yet-modern electronic soundtrack from Mellé fit so snugly with Homecoming's modern-yet-retro visual aesthetic as a pastiche of all the conspiracy thrillers it tips its hat to, in a way where his old-school analogue avant-garde music feels like something that could easily fit in among the soundtracks of present-day composers like, say, Brian Reitzell or Daniel Lopatin, it compelled me to want to return to The Andromeda Strain, and finally watch ALL OF IT.
Lo and behold...
...I DID IT!
And you know what else?
SURPRISE SURPRISE, IT'S ACTUALLY GREAT!
Robert Wise brought his keen eye for conjuring uniquely eerie imagery and quietly unnerving atmosphere, as he'd done in certain parts of The Day The Earth Stood Still, and all throughout The Haunting, and doubled down on that expertise to amazing effect on The Andromeda Strain. Particularly in the first act's creepy foray into the struck-dead town of Piedmont, where almost all of its 68 residents are found as still and lifeless as mannequins, eyes and mouths open, corpses scattered and strewn throughout the area with clear signs they died as suddenly as if they were all puppets whose strings were simultaneously cut. The synthesised electronic hum and throb of Mellé's music, the use of split-screen editing and split-diopter shots (which are littered throughout the film, by the way, and in conjunction with the Technicolor film stock makes the movie look ravishing), plus the disturbing, tantalising mystery of how and why this event could've possible occurred... it's all masterfully done.
The pacing of most of the film is akin (and perhaps an intentional stylistic nod?) to those meditatively quiet passages of 2001: A Space Odyssey, as the film deliberately takes its time to establish the competency and differing perspectives of the main quartet of scientists/doctors, and to depict the gruellingly painstaking preparation processes of the rigorous decontamination methods employed by this 1970's-era extra-top-secret, extra-dangerous underground biohazard facility. The plot itself is tertiary to the film's insistence on mood, mounting dread, and - like any good contagion-related thriller - the psychological exhaustion of constantly being made aware of your own body's sheer uncleanliness, and your body's helpless vulnerability to a mortal threat you cannot see, or (yet) understand.
The tone, look, music, cinematography, the innovative visual photographic effects from Douglas Trumbull, and even some of the costuming, all made me think that Panos Cosmatos must have drawn major influence from this film when he made Beyond The Black Rainbow. (The red-coloured Level 1 of the Wildfire complex, and the red jumpsuits worn by everyone working on that level, definitely bear resemblance to the environs and costumes of Black Rainbow's Sentionauts.)
But of all the things The Andromeda Strain's biological paranoia could have reminded me of - whether it's Outbreak, Carriers, or hell, even Contagion - the first that came to mind was how I felt when I first watched Chernobyl. And in a way, there are some similarities: a story of an unfathomable disaster that starts in one place and threatens to become a global emergency, via an invisible killing force that can only be stopped by the co-operation of a team of competent scientists, working against the brute force of the military and the short-sightedness of the politicians trying to keep it all a secret, all while the scientific progress needed to save lives gets perpetually hindered by the bureaucratic obfuscation of the political system.
Although that summary could also basically describe our reality circa 2020.
Some things never change, huh...?
Rating: ★★★★½
Originally published on Letterboxd.