David Wayne is Charles Dutton, the elder member of the scientist team.īy far the most interesting character is Dr. Jeremy Stone, architect of the Wildfire facility designed to deal with extraterrestrial encounters. Arthur Hill is more or less the central characters as Dr. James Olson plays Mark Hall, the brash young surgeon who provides the youthful energy on the team, and even he was in his 40s when the film came out. There are ample bellies, receding hairlines and neck wattle galore. It’s pretty much all middle-aged actors very much not in the Harrison Ford/Julia Roberts mold. I would very much place it in the “hard” science fiction category, with its emphasis on technology and harsh realities.Īnother notable thing about the film is the cast is so, well, normal-looking. It’s an idealized portrait of a modernistic present, but the present nonetheless.
Interestingly, “Andromeda” is not set in the future but the present, with contemporary military hardware, clothing, hardware, etc. My issue is not so much with the aesthetics of the effects as how much the movies relies on them to propel the story. Of course it all looks terribly outdated almost a half-century later, with blocky graphics and green-lettered screen readouts.
Douglas Trumbull also did the effects for “2001.” It was one of the first films to use computerized visual effects, so an astonishing portion of the 130 minutes of screen time involves staring at screens, or watching characters stare at screens. “Andromeda” is very much dominated by its special effects to an almost fetishistic degree. It’s completely dead weight, and a modern editor would lop off the entire thing if they were halfway competent. There’s a sequence that’s about 15 minutes long that just involves the scientists making their way down through five levels of a secret underground station, going through various rounds of decontamination and body scanning. Popular films just had a generally different pace back then, with long establishing shots, pregnant pauses and an observational camera perspective.īy today’s standards it’s incredibly slow and mired in minutia. Wise began as a film editor in the 1930s and directed films spanning seven decades and virtually every genre.įor a “race against the clock” type of movie, it’s a rather listless, obstinately paced one.
“Andromeda” was directed by the great Robert Wise from an adaptation by pet screenwriter Nelson Gidding. In a lot of ways, it’s the godfather of the “outbreak” disaster movie subgenre - “28 Days Later,” “Contagion,” etc.
#Andromeda strain movie 1971 cast crew crack
A crack team of scientists discovers that an alien lifeform fell to Earth with it, threatening all human life on the planet. The story involves an American satellite that has crash-landed in the desert, killing nearly everyone in the tiny town of Piedmont, Ariz. Michael Crichton’s novel was a huge hit for the doctor-turned-best-selling-author, launching a long run of film adaptations. Then after Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” in 1968, audiences were again willing to watch serious stories involving lasers, space aliens and the like. Science fiction had been generally regarded as the plaything of young people - at least since the early silent film era of “Metropolis” and the like. I’m guessing in 1971 it seemed like a fairly tense, purposeful sci-fi drama at a time when such things were still fairly novel.
“The Andromeda Strain” was a procedural show before they had a name for such a thing.