The Andromedra Strain
The threat that came from space
In the mid-1970s, I watched a movie on television that got me very excited. First, because it was from science fiction genre, which I love even for genetic reasons. In addition, the film dealt with threats from space and showed special effects with very advanced computers. As I was learning computer science at that time, when few people knew what it was, it was immediate passion. The film was “The Andromeda Strain” (USA, 1971).
The story of “The Andromeda Strain” begins when a U.S. Air Force team searches for a crashed satellite in a small city in the state of New Mexico. When the team simply stops responding to the radio, a reconnaissance plane is sent to investigate the situation. What it finds is a bunch of bodies scattered around the streets.
At this moment a special group of civilian scientists is summoned to investigate a possible biological threat. Their mission was to find out what it was and how to neutralize it. The group consisted of Jeremy Stone (Arthur Hill), Mark Hall (James Olson), Charles Dutton (David Wayne) and Kate Reid (Ruth Leavitt), all expoentes in the fields of medicine or biological research.
The group is taken to a secret facility in the Nevada desert, where they discover that the threat in question came with the satellite brought from space. The virus instantly killed almost everyone in the city of Piedmont, except for an elderly man with ulcer problems and a newborn baby.
Scientists fight against time to identify the cause of so many deaths, with an instant transmission capability and immunity to all defenses known to human science.
To complicate the situation, the laboratory had a self-destruct system with an atomic bomb – and this can trigger the spread of the disease on a global scale!
Few people today know, but at the time of this film, a small computer filled an entire room, although the memory and disk capacity were ridiculously inferior to that of the simplest phone nowadays. It is curious how the effects that enchanted me at the time today seem extremely coarse … Even so, the film earned Oscar nominations for Best Editing and Art Direction, as well as a Golden Globe nomination for Best Soundtrack.
One of the reasons of the success of this film was its director, Robert Wise, whose resume includes major hits such as “West Side Story” (USA, 1961), “The Sound of Music” (USA, 1965) and “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” (USA, 1979).
Another aspect that added an appeal to the film was the fact that we were living in the Cold War, where the powerful Soviet Union and the mysterious China of Mao-Tse-Tung fueled the paranoia of the communist threat, the same that today only exists in the minds of the brainless extremists.
It is in this environment that the story of “The Andromeda Strain” develops, based on the book of the same name by a still unknown writer, Michael Crichton. Crichton would be famous for the books that spawned the “Jurassic Park” movies. Among films, series and games, there are more than fifty titles based on his books, and at least nine were directed by him.
“The Andromeda Strain” was remade into a miniseries format in 2008, with the same title, with some changes in the story and presented in four chapters.