“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.
You’d be wrong.
It was one of the first books written by young Michael Crichton, and the movie is almost literally word-for-word the novel he wrote.
And for JW, try to remember, the government in 1971 got us to the moon.
The current government can’t even keep Mexicans in Mexico.
One of these things is not like the other.
And you have trouble believing such a facility could exist??
Look up, at your convenience, how long Area 51 was a thing before you knew about it.
Then google when the SR-71 was built, versus when anyone knew about it outside of a couple of senior officials in the Air Farce and the CIA, and half a dozen pilots and their backseaters.
I’ll wait.
If anything, Crichton soft-soaped what the government could or would do.
When the movie came out, we were bombing Cambodia.
The year after that was Watergate.
This is why the movie holds up so well 50+ years later.
Not least of it being that besides being a science fiction classic, he gets government (and scientific) stupidity as well as he gets government competence.
Aesop, I mentioned the Moon, first. Yes, there was competence.
Oh, if they had built it in Area 51? Yeah, I can buy that. Building it beneath a soils lab that you or I could drive up to in 18 months and no one know what was up? Not so much.
Okay.
So what’s under Area 51, right now… 🙂
Then for grins, look up Ft. Meade. Bamford’s open-source book on the NSA might stop your breath, just a little bit. 90% of that base is underground.
As noted, Crichton soft-soaped what 1971 government could get up to.
And Crichton wasn’t positing a soils lab you or I could drive up to.
Just something that’d pass for one, if anyone ever got that far.
What would have happened to the two scientists who showed up, if they hadn’t had the challenge and passwords, would have been the stuff of GITMO nightmares.
You or I can drive onto Area 51 right now. They have signs, but very few fences or gates.
It’s the dozens and dozens of guys in 5.11s and Raybans in 4WDs hovering around the perimeter 24/7/365 that are the real security there.
Guys who’ve hiked in overland and lived to tell the tale describe hovering helicopters at night, using thermals, sandblasting empty beach chairs on hills 10 miles away from the center of the base.
Over the last couple of decades, they’ve expanded the areas you aren’t allowed to access, mainly ridges and mountaintops, to the point you can’t even see Area 51 from mountains miles and miles away.
But if you want a really long day, and are bored with your current life, ignore the signs and drive right onto the site.
They should name it Milk Carton Land. That’s where people who go there usually end up, by all accounts.
While that would be an interesting day trip, I don’t think those nice men in Raybans would take me to see anything interesting, like where they keep Nic Cage’s acting career.
SPOT ON!!!!!
I’ve read almost every other Chrichton book, but never read this one. Most of them have been true to his novels.
The book was short, tight, and hard science fiction. Really good. It’s the first sci-fi I ever read, and probably responsible for my career as a science teacher.
I haven’t seen it and based on your review I am unlikely to.
I’ll bet you $5 you got more enjoyment out of the post than you would have out of the movie.
Excellent post and way better than the movie…..but it needed more PEZ dispensers.
PEZ dispensers are to blogs what cowbells are to music.
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.
Yes. His career appeared to stall after he wrote State of Fear. I guess he knew it would hurt his career but wrote it anyway.
I didn’t read/watch many of Crichton’s books as I’m just not into biology driven sci-fi, but I highly respected the man for calling out the global warming hypocrisy. I think his views on a lot of things would match up well with the readers on this site.
I also appreciate that he made science popular for the masses which is the only reason I can now get my wife to watch a sci-fi movie with me.
You ain’t seen nothing yet!
Michael Crichton: 2003 Michelin Lecture at CalTech:
Aliens Cause Global Warming
https://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers/Crichton2003.pdf
Commended to the reading of anyone who hasn’t seen it.
This is a DaVinci level masterclass on scientific reasoning, by Crichton at the pinnacle of his powers, and he’s also hilarious.
You ain’t seen nothing yet.
Michael Crichton 2003 Michelin Lecture at CalTech:
Aliens Cause Global Warming
https://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers/Crichton2003.pdf
Commended to anyone who hasn’t read it already.
This is a DaVinci-level masterclass in scientific reasoning by Crichton when he was at the pinnacle of his powers, and he’s hilarious.
100% true. He was a writer with good ideas.
The global warming book was great. I had an extra copy in my classroom that I would lend out to interested kids. They always come back and ask, “Why aren’t my other teachers teaching this?”
I pointed out that most of those teachers taught social studies.
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.”
Sorta like Neal Stephenson.
YES!!!!!
I love Neal. Great ideas. but when he’s done, he’s done. Met him a couple of times, seems to be a great guy, but he’s got to finish books.
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.
Ricky emailed this to me and inspired the post.
I’d agree, and the downside is that he had wonderful world-building up to the point where he said, “okay, I’m done”.
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.
Winner!
She had an epileptic seizure, she didn’t “doze off”.
It is a world in 2025 where the Girlboss don’t need no man. But, no, epilepsy. Flashing lights.
I saw this with my Dad when I was 11. It was very boring but the book was fine. The 2008 remake with Ricky Schroeder was unwatchable.
Never saw the remake. Sounds like that was a good thing.
The music for the soundtrack was pretty cool. Done by Gil Mellé, it’s Music Concrete, which implies you have to be stoned to like it. Maybe.
The soundtrack LP was peculiar. Since the bug in the movie was a hexagon, they cut the LP to match. Made for a shorter album, too.
IMHO, one of the worst Chrichton novels was Congo. Some of the buzzword buffet was unintentionally hilarious; including a Dupont brand name for paint as part of some electronic widgetry. The phrase “walling a book” wasn’t in common usage then, but the urge to throw it out a window, either open or closed was there…
But they made a movie of it, too. Best use of California Dreamin’ in a movie.
The scientific premise of TAS was a hot topic in the 1960s. The Urey-Miller experiment in the 1950s proved that organic molecules could be spontaneously created from inorganic gases, and radio telescopes started identifying those same organic molecules floating around in outer space. The idea of panspermia, that life on Earth originated in space and was seeded from extraterrestrial sources, went from wild speculation (it originated with the ancient Greeks) to a plausible hypothesis in the 1960s. In The Andromeda Strain, the so-called Scoop satellites were a top-secret project to obtain samples of scary extraterrestrial panspermia lifeforms known by the US Government to be out there, and the Underground Top Secret Lab had been built to process the satellites. The movie starts when one of the satellites has a bad reentry.
In the 50+ years since TAS, the panspermia / extraterrestrial life topic has, er, evolved.
We now know that Mars had an atmosphere and lakes/rivers/oceans when the Earth was still a dry, molten ball of lava, and that meteorites from Mars that impact the Earth are fairly common. I have tiny samples from three of them in my study as curios. It is entirely that life originated on Mars long before it existed on Earth, and may have been transported by meteorites to Earth. We may actually be the surviving descendants of Martians.
As for as the idea of a swirling vortex of innumerable new viruses existing out there with unknown epidemiological threat level waiting to be Scooped up and analyzed in leaky labs with no self-destruct nuke…
https://theconversation.com/researchers-identified-over-5-500-new-viruses-in-the-ocean-including-a-missing-link-in-viral-evolution-180545
And as for the US Government protecting us from extraterrestrial life…
Well, we’ll see . . . 🙂
Back to our home planet!
And in the movie trivia department, The Andromeda Strain was directed by Robert Wise, who also directed The Day The Earth Stood Still in the early-1950s and Star Trek: The Motion Picture in the late 1970s. So he had a thing for first-contact sci-fi stories. He also directed West Side Story and The Sound of Music, winning Best Director Oscars for both, along with a long list of other films.
ST:TMP almost killed Trek. If only it had Jets and Sharks.
Paramount didn’t know, and still doesn’t, what to do with Star Trek.
Until they stopped finger-banging it, and gave it back to Roddenberry.
Once they lost Roddenberry (just like when Disney lost Stan Lee) everything they do with it resembles a cautionary tale regarding a dozen oversexed male monkeys attempting coitus with a football.
Jar Jar Abrams hasn’t helped in that regard.
The only way to do it worse would be to hire Sam Mendes, supervised by Kathleen Kennedy.
6:2:1 they do that next, run it into the ground, and then begin digging for Atlantis in the earth’s crust.
I’m also 50% certain that whoever is digging up Crichton’s unpublished manuscripts of Epically Awful Work and publishing things that should have been burned upon his death is owned/run by Kathleen Kennedy or Disney, if not both.
Agreed. It’s now . . . a mess. Unwatchable.
And, if only Kathleen had gotten what she deserved after Twilight Zone.
I remember as a kid watching it on TV with my dad, I think around mid 70’s and falling asleep because it was so boring.
The only thing I remember is lasers burning a guy’s face or something, and the lady scientist didn’t like blinking red lights.
Watched just a few months ago on Roku and fell asleep again!
Yup, lasers hit that one guy. But the aim was off because Carl’s dad was a bit hungover that day.
The flashing red light (flashing because a value outside of the normal limits of pH, 7.38-7.42, for human circulatory fluid, was measured for the drunk’s blood) triggered an epileptic episode for the woman.
What I remembered, and have referred to numerous times, is the concept of “odd-man-out” – James Olson, the guy who doesn’t think the way the others do, in case the group might be missing something important.
N.B. – Unlike the other commenters, and unlike Michael Crichton, I have not written a best-selling novel. So this was a top-notch novel & film for me to enjoy and savor. But what do I know.
On a dino dig I participated in Ft. Peck MT in 1997, the backhoe cut through a vertebra of a T. rex (Peck’s Rex), and out poured a number of small purple-colored balls. Hey, where did I see that before – yeah, the congealed blood from the arteries of the dead town-dwellers in Andromeda Strain.
“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.
THEY PUT PEOPLE ON THE MOON AND MADE a movie at BORING.”,(Oregon) Boring & Dull Festival,
[ Boring (Oregon) and Dull (England) ]
Well, that would be a fun show!
What I want to know is, HOW DO YOU KNOW UNCLE TED???????
Did you know him in person? Did he ever go to your school to do a show?
wingfootjr@yahoo.com
No. It was a mail thing.
“We had just put men on the Moon, and stopped going because we were so good at it that the ratings dropped.”
My memory of those days is that there were massive demonstrations basically saying, “why are we spending money on space when we could be handing it out to poor people?” I remember pointing out to someone that there wasn’t so much as a single 7-11 in space and every penny was being spent here on the ground and that was so far over their head they couldn’t grasp it. This was, after all, just after LBJ had gotten his civil rights stuff passed and was saying, “I’ll have those n…..s voting democrat for 200 years.” Both anti-war and “give us the money” protests were everyday.
I had read Andromeda Strain and when the movie came out, took a girl to see it. She never wanted to go out with me again.
Did you ever write Crichton a thank you letter for that?
^underrated comment
You know, that level of greed (the protestors) are the people who eat seed-corn before planting.
Hmm, old and sometimes faulty memory here but I thought they were secretly looking for a new bio-weapon, definitely not helping people. Oh wait, gov killing people is their definition of helping.
Part of the movie does indicate that the lab might have been used for bioweapon use. Good catch.