Official PoCo Muse Film Critic Jeff Schultz revisits The Andromeda Strain for his August 2021 Review.
Nightly sounds of the black field cricket are a hint of summer’s end. Less subtle are the sandwich board signs outside cafes informing the passerby that pumpkin season will be here soon, no matter what temperature it will be outside. Perhaps even less are the displays of Halloween candy at the end of every aisle at the supermarket. August always feels like the Sunday of a long weekend and it’s time for the school and work routine to resume. Why look at it that way when it can be the Friday that leads into the autumn season? That seems to be the push these days and interestingly it was like that way at Shauer’s Premier Theatre in Valparaiso fifty years ago when kids could get a triple dose of the creepy-crawlies before they head back to classroom with a “Triple Frankenstein and Dracula Show” comprised of Hammer Films’ “Dracula Has Risen from the Grave,” “Frankenstein Must be Destroyed” and “The Face of Fu Manchu” which played there during the week of August 19, 1971. I’m holding off on those kinds of films for October when it’s timely but for this month we’ll look at a film that played a week earlier which also packed a triple-punch of fear with mysterious substances from outer space, germ warfare, and government agents who drag you away from your late-night cocktail party.
Premier audiences got to look at the confidential files of “The Andromeda Strain,” a science fiction thriller starring Arthur Hill, David Wayne, James Olson, and Kate Reid as an assembled team of scientists called to unravel what turned a remote Arizona town into a valley of corpses. None of the actors provided much star power although they had some notable roles prior in TV and film. Wayne played the Mad Hatter in a few episodes of “Batman” alongside Adam West. Olson appeared in the 1968 film “Rachel, Rachel” playing a love interest for Joanne Woodward and Reid starred as the mother of Natalie Wood’s character in “This Property is Condemned,” released in 1966. Hill would be the lead in a TV series for ABC called “Owen Marshall, Counselor at Law” a short time later in the fall of 1971. The bigger name on the movie is the film’s director, Robert Wise. Wise won Oscars twice for directing “West Side Story” and “The Sound of Music.” The latter was the highest grossing movie of all time for five years before “Gone with the Wind” recaptured the title in 1971. He also directed the seminal sci-fi film “The Day the Earth Stood Still” two decades earlier.
Nowhere near reaching “The Sound of Music” in terms of success, “The Andromeda Strain” was a modest hit when first released with a gross of $12.4 million against a budget of $6 million. Unbeknownst at the time, the movie planted a seed and a large one at that. It was the first screen adaptation of a novel by Michael Crichton which makes it part of a billion-dollar cinematic empire today largely due to a film series based on his later novel “Jurassic Park.” Crichton wrote “The Andromeda Strain”, his sixth novel, inspired by British spy publications at the time that also paid much attention to detail to science. He received an MD from Harvard Medical School but dropped out of practicing medicine to pursue writing. His studies fueled his inspiration to write medical fiction (and create the popular TV series “ER”) although his most lucrative creations are that of science gone bad. He directed his own screenplay for “Westworld” in 1973 that featured vacationers fighting rogue cowboy robots at a theme park. It’s been revived as an HBO series.
The film version of “The Andromeda Strain” is also heavy on science lingo and details. Once the satellite carrying the deadly pathogen is retrieved securely from the town, it is taken to a secret underground lab known as Wildfire to be studied. The four scientists are herded through each level of the facility, starting with decontamination that’s even more elaborate than what we’re used to in our current pandemic (i.e. washing our hands for 20 seconds each time). Electronic voices on the intercom are constantly directing them to Sector E or G or some other letter, than proceed to Chamber B past Control room 1-H, etc. It’s tedious but this is where we see the characters’ personalities. The older ones are the most compliant and serious while the other two, one is a sharp-minded woman with a sarcastic personality and one is a proud bachelor, provide much needed humor. Then there’s the monster of the movie, the green slime that seems to be growing and mutating at lightning pace that it could obliterate all life on earth if it escapes. The little devil causes blood to crystallize, resulting in the victim’s immediate death when inhaled. The government above is a little more than ready to take drastic actions if necessary and the lab itself is armed with a nuclear self-destruct device should containment be breached.
Despite its ample amount of “people doing science” throughout, “The Andromeda Strain” is a taut thriller and impressive for what was considered science fiction at the time of its release. The genre formed in the silent movie days by filmmakers with big ideas on what the future would look like such as Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” in 1927 and the 1936 film “Things to Come” based on H.G. Wells’ works. After WWII, the genre turned to tales of giant creatures transformed by nuclear energy from atomic fallout. There were only so many reptiles and insects that could level entire cities until director Stanley Kubrick brought philosophy back into the fold with the film “2001: A Space Odyssey” in 1968 at the height of space exploration. It was a movie as different as anyone had seen before, and quite frankly ever since. Now elevated beyond the days of Buck Rogers, the genre was more about science and less about fiction, at least in tone like “The Andromeda Strain” and “Soylent Green.” Don’t expect the same though for “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes.”
My rating for “The Andromeda Strain” is 3 out of 4 stars. Funny thing I would lastly note is the movie received a G rating from the new Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) rating system. Keep in mind the G rating then included non-children’s films like “The Odd Couple” and “The Green Berets,” but I believe “The Andromeda Strain” to be the least G-rated-G-rated film you’ll ever see. Not only is there occasional profanity and nudity, including a topless female cadaver, the town scenes are highly disturbing. If you think Disney’s talking mice are creepy, the scientists stumble upon an old woman who hung herself and a man who drowned in the bathtub. Perhaps the MPAA got into the Halloween spirit a little early too.