“I’ll have the answer when I know why a sixty-nine-year-old sterno drinker with an ulcer is like a normal six-month-old baby.” – The Andromeda Strain
What do you call it when two strains of a disease are identical? Plague-erism.
Flipping through the television the other night, there were movies the computer network that pervades our lives (paging Uncle Ted) thought I might want to watch. Now, if you’re a paranoid person, you might think about how by putting a piece of media in front of a particular person at a particular time might be nudging, but hey, sometimes a movie is just a movie.
The one that caught my eye was one I’d seen as a kid – The Andromeda Strain (1971).
I am certain I haven’t seen The Andromeda Strain since I was younger than 10. I think I saw it on a Saturday afternoon or Saturday night Creepy Creature Feature UHF show. Regardless, I thought, what the heck, I’ll give it another looks for the sake of nostalgia.
For those, like me, who were a little fuzzy on the plot, I’ll give it a recap.
A satellite re-enters the atmosphere, and because Elon Musk isn’t even born yet, it lands in the middle of a village in northeastern New Mexico. Because New Mexico hasn’t agreed to join the United States and rename itself Greenland, a virus kills everyone in town. And there’s not a Tesla® in sight to tow it.
Why does Elon love satellites so much? He’s transmitten with them.
In the first amazingly improbable event, the government decides not to drive to pick it up, but rather sends a Phantom F-4 to take pictures. Now, I really think the Phantom F-4 is a really cool plane, but I’d bet that since in 1971 you couldn’t throw a rock and not hit an Air Force plane in New Mexico they could have sent something else, but, hey, Phantom F-4s are big sexy to the under 10 crowd.
Hell, they’re still sexy to me at current age.
Second in are two scientists who have the equivalent of sixteen days of air in their space suits, because everyone knows you send Nobel Prize-winning scientists to do field reconnaissance in an area where everyone is dead from a completely unknown cause.
They find a drunk and a baby. It would have been more reasonable to find a drunk baby, because, after all, New Mexico, so they lose credibility points on that one, too.
That is the most Zelensky-like baby I’ve ever seen.
By some mysterious field, the drunk and baby are separated from the scientists while simultaneously being isolated from everyone and sent to the most secret laboratory in the universe (more on that later) while the scientists make their way much more slowly there.
It is at the facility where we discover that the three male scientists all suffer from the same birth defect: they were born without any sort of individual personality. The lone female scientist is played by an actress who was 39, but looked like she was closer to 59. I guess life was harder in 1971. The female scientist does, however have a personality, most charitably described as “being an utter bitch.” How bad was it? She could be on The View without an audition.
So, they make it to this super top-secret biological containment lab, and this one isn’t even in Wuhan. It is, instead, cunningly hidden below an anonymous Department of Agriculture soil testing building. How do you access this lab?
By going into the tool room and pressing a secret button near the wheelbarrows. It’s like James Bond meets Oliver Wendell Douglas from Green Acres. All we needed, really, was Eb as a lab assistant.
Apparently when you press the secret button it goes Dong. Ding Dong.
Here is where the plot falls apart for adult John Wilder. From the dialogue, it becomes clear that this super-secret lab was built in the last year. And it is secret. But it also goes for, at a minimum, of 140 feet (7.4 Angstroms) under the ground. It’s also, again, by observation, at least 150 feet (2 Curies) wide.
This building is not made of straw, sticks, or bricks, rather, it looks like it could be a space station. Based on my not inconsiderable experience in building large biological containment laboratories underground, I would estimate that the minimum cost for a structure of this type (and I mean minimum) would be three-quarters of a billion dollars, and much more likely to be on the order of two or three billion.
And it was done in a year. With a computer system that still isn’t available in 2025.
Have you ever met contractors? I have never met a group of people more like a ladies sewing-circle for gossip. And can you imagine how much they’d talk at the bars at night? Sure, everybody with the plans has a Top Secret Compartmented Information clearance, but somebody has to bend the rebar, baby. And those dudes leave behind empty bottles of Schlitz™ and out-of-wedlock children named Carl.
Three billion dollars, and constructed in a year? Carl’s dad built it while drunk and smelling like stale Dairy Queen™.
Oh, and did I mention that when the four scientists got to this lab, it was fully staffed by people who were comfortable there and knew how to run everything? What the hell did those people do all day until the Green Chili Greenlanders were killed by the alien virus? Minesweeper™ and the World Wide Web© hadn’t been invented yet. I bet they did shots of Jim Beam© all day or played Pong™ with petri dishes.
Paging D.O.G.E.!
We discover that the facility has a nuclear bomb planted in it, and the only person trusted to let the whole place blow up is the Incel among the group. Great strategy – put the 50 year old virgin in charge, hell, I think his name is even Dr. Foreveralone. In an Amazing Plot Twist™ the scientists discover that the thing that killed everyone thrives on power and a nuclear bomb would make it eat Pittsburgh.
In a Predictable Plot Device©, it turns out you can’t disarm the bomb until it decides it wants to blow up. Great planning, Kevin, father of Carl.
Great Caesar’s ghost, Marty! Who could have seen this plot device coming?
But wait! Now the organism has mutated! It no longer kills people, it just wants to . . . eat synthetic rubber? Paging Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine, and Dr. Deus Ex Machina. The scientists end up doing nothing, and saving no one while spending billions. In this they may have inspired Dr. Fauci.
My biggest problem with the movie is that it assumes that government is competent in doing things other than taxing people, printing money, and allowing people to play Minesweeper® while writing grants to perform Gay Sesame Street© in Rhodesia.
I guess I can see that. 1971 America isn’t 2025 America. We had just put men on the Moon, and stopped going because we were so good at it that the ratings dropped.
THEY PUT PEOPLE ON THE MOON AND MADE IT BORING.
The other strange thought is that government really wanted to help the people. I don’t get that in 2025 America. We have a Department of Education that never educated anyone, and a Department of Energy that doesn’t produce energy. If we had a Department of Air, we’d probably all suffocate since the department would focus on getting air to Botswana.
Or, maybe, sometimes a movie is just a movie.
Is the original book as disjointed? It was written by Michael Crichton who is usually pretty solid in terms of the consistency of the science. But it wouldn’t surprise me if Hollywood dropped the ball on the screenplay.
If that is the case it would be somewhat ironic as Crichton also brought us the term Gell-Mann amnesia. It is the phenomenon where you read an article/newspaper/story about something in your field of expertise and find it loaded with errors because the journalist was too stupid and/or lazy to write it accurately. But then you read a different article on a subject outside your field, and just assume it to be 100% accurate simply because you don’t enough about the subject to question it.
I used to fall into this Gell Mann trap all the time….and not just with books/articles, but with people as well. A lot of people bullshit their way up the ladder and I would believe them because they came across as smart. Then they would talk about something I knew well and I realized they were a fraud. I’m now pretty good at recognizing the warning signs (e.g. they talk fast and smoothly with lots of authority on a wide ranges of subjects) and if in doubt, I try to steer the subject to areas I know well as confirmation. Needless to say, I no longer trust over half of my current management.
I haven’t seen it and based on your review I am unlikely to.
It scared the hell out of me at age 18. The guy that wrote the novel it was based on really got into dinosaurs later in life; he wrote a novel about that named “Triassic Basin”, I think. And wrote another book that dispelled global warming.
Amazingly, he contracted stage 4 cancer shortly thereafter and died. No joke.
Michael Crichton wrote the great first halves of several novels. Unfortunately, he had no idea how to end any of them. They all, every one of them, end with a massive deus-ex-machina.
“Oh, look. I’ve just about reached my page count. Looks like I have two pages to wrap up all these plot lines.”
Read the book and loved the movie as a young teen upon their release. John’s review is perfectly accurate; this movie oozes a post-Apollo innocence that is from a bygone era. Ive always remembered (and been haunted by) the best line from the book:
“The survival value of human intelligence has yet to be demonstrated.”
To wit:
https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/dr-peter-mccullough-links-bird-flu-outbreak-usda-gain-function-experiment-georgia
We have learned nothing from the warnings of both The Andromeda Strain and Wuhan COVID.
In another installment of “Movies that can’t be made today” I nominate The Andromeda Strain for a single scene that renders it null and void in the modern era. It’s been a looooong time since I saw it, but IIRC* the b!tch in the lab went drowsy sifting through innumerable microscope slides. She missed the one that was key to survival, and all hope was thereafter lost.
Try to imagine the howling from triggered fembots if anyone dared make a movie today in which the girlboss is not utterly perfect and is actually at fault for something. That character would be recast as an incompetent White dude faster than you can say ‘Nurse Ratched’.
*Too many miles and too much bourbon, so I could be thinking of another movie. Patently misogynist point still stands, though.
She was hiding epilepsy and wouldn’t reveal it lest Uncle Sam cashier her. It was shown in the early part of the movie. Checkov’s seizure disorder. She was having a seizure when she missed the slide.