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Universal, 1971
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Directed and Produced by Robert Wise Written by Nelson Gidding Based on the Novel by Michael Crichton Music by Gill Melle Cinematography by Richard H. Kline Edited by Stuart Gilmore and John W. Holmes Production Design by Boris Leven Cast |
To memorialize the great Mr. Wise now that he has left us, I wanted to pick a special movie of his to review—one of his better films, but not one of his much discussed classics. His mega-hit musicals have received plenty of attention (and I honestly don’t like either film that much, but then I’m not a fan of Hollywood musicals), Star Trek: The Motion Picture has been Trekked to death already, and although I could write in great loving detail about The Haunting and The Day the Earth Stood Still, I wanted to sample something a bit more fresh from the Robert Wise table. So I turned to one of his other successful science-fiction pictures, the still frightening space-contamination thriller The Andromeda Strain.
The original 1969 novel established Michael Crichton as the new king of the airport bookstore thriller and set the stage for most of his novels since with its cold data-heavy style and minimal characterization. Much of Crichton’s work after The Andromeda Strain suffers from his heavy-handed didactic style and his refusal to realize that other science-fiction writers have usually thought of all his ideas long before he got to them; Crichton writes science fiction for people who don’t read science fiction, and it shows. Compare his dinosaur thriller Jurassic Park with Michael Swanick’s superior riff on a similar theme, The Bones of the Earth, and you’ll see exactly what I mean. But The Andromeda Strain’s antiseptic approach to a scientific crisis remains potent and believable today. Wise’s cinematic version perfectly transfers the icy journalistic style of the book to the screen, even preserving Crichton’s pages worth of computer-printed documents. The title sequence alone shows Wise’s grasp of the book’s tone: a flashing montage of colored line diagrams flit beneath bold typewritten credits while a score made of freakish electronic tonalities akin to those in Forbidden Planet grinds away.
Wise mastered the documentary approach to science fiction in The Day the Earth Stood Still, which used actual reporters playing themselves on multiple emergency broadcasts to convey reality to the landing of an alien ship in Washington, D.C. Here, Wise emphasizes exact scientific and military procedures to thrust the audience into the mounting terror of the story of a strange microscopic killer that has fallen to Earth on a crashed satellite. The opening scene has two soldiers entering a New Mexican town near the crash site. The soldiers report the discovery of dead bodies everywhere, then the sighting of something in white before their transmission goes dead. The sequence unravels entirely through sound as the military recovery team at the base hears the frightening transmission. It is an eerie and restrained way to open a science-fiction film, and Wise maintains this docu-drama style throughout.
The main characters now enter the story: a team of three scientists and a doctor who are part of the emergency “Wildfire” protocol created in the event of a sudden contamination, particularly one that might return from a space mission. The four experts gather in an underground laboratory complex where they race to find a way to identify and isolate the virus…creature…germ…known as Andromeda that killed the town but mysteriously left alive a mewling baby and a crazy old man. Wise made the right decision to bypass celebrities and cast unfamiliar faces in these lead roles. Without any connection to the actors as movie star personalities, it’s easy for viewers to suspend disbelief and accept them as competent scientists. Like the book, the movie does not make much issue of the tensions between them; even changing the gender of the book’s Dr. Leavitt to a woman serves not to artificially create tension (either romantic or chauvinistic) but to simulate the reality that many women had entered the hard sciences in the 1960s. All three give solid performances, with David Wayne’s elder scientists making the best impression. Kate Reid sometimes hammers too hard at her hardboiled grouchy matron character, but she fits the part much better than casting a leggy poster girl. For a comparison, just think of how ridiculous both Jessica Alba and Denise Richards look when they tried to play credible scientists while wearing super-tight bust enhancing outfits.
The style of The Andromeda Strain is chilly and sterile, very similar to the vogue science-fiction film of the time, 2001: A Space Odyssey. At 131 minutes (the poster claiming it runs 130 minutes is a lie!), the movie takes its time to go over the details of the Wildfire Complex and the careful procedures the scientists must to follow as they descend from level to level until they reach the germ-free laboratory. The set design of the complex is a marvel of clean, curved surfaces without a trace of warmth. The sense of a rigidly controlled environment weighs down on everything, which constantly reminds viewers of how much care must be taken to prevent a deadly outbreak of the strain. Some of the set concepts are quite amazing, especially the human sized “glove box,” where Dr. Hall works on his two patients inside a sealed suit that attaches to the wall allowing him to move between of the suit and the safe room quickly.
The story doesn’t feel as tightly controlled as the Wildfire complex, and most of its flaws come directly from the novel. In order to fully isolate the Wildfire team from communication with the government—and therefore, prolong and hamper the efforts to stop Andromeda—a rather clumsy device shuts down their communication without them knowing it. An awkward audio “flash forward” explains how this happened, and it’s a moment that jars the audience out of the film. The story also leaves unexplained a number of strange leaps, especially at the end where Andromeda’s seemingly miraculous mutation sounds too pat to be believable.
But the actual climax doesn’t have anything wrong with it. It’s a nail-biter and date’s arm-gnawer. The Wildfire complex threatens to go up in a nuclear blast due to a poorly thought-out safeguard system (say hello Dr. Strangelove), and Dr. Hall has to make a dangerous race through laser guns to the shut-off point keep everyone from get fried and Andromeda from harnessing the energy to turn itself into a super-colony. As a relentless suspense sequence, it steals the whole show.
The film has a moment that still shocks today, the “choke the monkey” scene. It’s not what you think: this is a literal monkey choking. The scientists expose a lab rat to the infected satellite in a sealed room to see if the unknown killer is still potent. The rat collapses and dies, 
so they then expose a Rhesus Monkey. The monkey convulses and gasps horribly before falling into a heap. The monkey is obviously real, as is its fear and pain, making you wonder if the filmmakers actually made a primate snuff film. However, the ASPCA logo appears prominently in the credits, and Robert Wise on the documentary included in the DVD explains how he achieved the scene without murdering its method-acting star. Carbon monoxide was pumped into the room to remove all the oxygen, and when the box containing the monkey was unsealed, the animal choked on the airless environment. Assistant director Jim Fargo (who would later direct a film with plenty o’ monkey action, Every Which Way But Loose) rushed in and revived the monkey with an oxygen tank a few seconds after it stopped moving. So the monkey wasn’t killed, but no doubt the ASPCA would never allow such methods today; it’s fairly clear how horrible the experience was for the little nipper. However, the scene does achieve its intended effect of making viewers aware of the lethality of Andromeda, previously only indicated by peaceful-looking corpses.
Although the computer technology in The Andromeda Strain appears creaky and even occasionally silly today, and the look and design recalls a very different era in science-fiction filmmaking—the pre-Star Wars age of cold verisimilitude—the movie still works as an entertaining thriller, and Robert Wise deserves a large part of the credit. Not every film he made was great, but he put levelheaded direction and solid storytelling into each one. This kind of intelligent and mature approach to filmmaking will never go out of style, and that’s the legacy that Robert Wise leaves behind him.