When I first saw this movie as a tweener, I was surprised by how much it kept me in suspense and scared because I had attained that age of when you know the flick will pan out well for the good guys. Then again, Andromeda was made in the Seventies, the last decade with any kind of “unhappy” ending: the heroes die (The Parallax View, Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid, Network, Silent Running, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) or off they go toward an uncertain future (I can only come up with American Graffiti and Close Encounters of the Third Kind).
Now it sadly made me chuckle since we’ve made greater strides in microbiology, pathology and (the big one) computers. I wish our wisdom kept pace. I could see a pandemic like this actually happening yet we’d fail to contain it, especially with the recent wave of ignorance sweeping America over the last 30 years.
For those who haven’t seen it, watch this version, don’t waste your time with the remake my friend Lester ripped on. What’s it about? A satellite crashes near a small New Mexico town. The Air Force heads in to retrieve it but the crewmen die horribly and quickly. Fearing the satellite has brought back an extraterrestrial plague a thousand times worse than the Black Death, the government enacts Project Wildfire to contain the outbreak and maybe find a solution (cure, vaccination, etc.). From there Andromeda gets rather technical on how micro-organisms work, decontamination techniques, why someone drinks sterno (“squeeze”), so on. Today’s audiences would walk out in 20 minutes unless there were a car chase or explosion to keep the plot advancing.
It certainly demonstrated novelist Michael Crichton’s medical school training, namely in the pathological matters. The guy who saves the day being a doctor, not one of those fancy-schmancy scientists, comes as no shock too. He should’ve stuck with medical thrillers as this proved. Crichton didn’t know crap when it came to climate change, computers, robots, dinosaurs and genetics.
Back to my point. Give The Andromeda Strain a try. Not just for the nostalgia factor. See if it can still surprise and/or scare a rather blasé populace.