The Andromeda Strain (1971)

Michael Crichton's 1969 novel, The Andromeda Strain, reads like a chatty medical geekfest team-written by Isaac Asimov, Tom Clancy, and Robin Cook. The movie hews closely to the novel, even to the point of (gasp) presenting science on an equal footing with fiction. (Here brainy and collegial male and female scientists are the saviors of the human race instead of action-figure alpha males in the military-political command chain.) Like any Jacques Cousteau film, it makes perfect sense to portray (rather than gloss over) the multileveled descent into the bowels of the Wildfire laboratory. The whole narrative is presented as a biomedical detective story, from the aerial photography flyover of the town of Piedmont to the hazmat-suited Wildfire team performing a field biopsy on the wrist of a corpse to the recovery of two survivors and the satellite to the clinical and molecular-biology work in Wildfire itself. "Hard" science fiction novels and movies such as The Andromeda Strain are less about fatuous or syrupy entertainment and more about intellectual and ethical education -- less about providing a wild if forgettable ride and more about delivering a meaty and cogent examination of the hows, whys, and wherefores of human decisions and actions (esp. those that will determine whether we as a species survive or become extinct, largely from our own ignorance). While technology has certainly advanced rapidly since their day, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Fantastic Voyage, and The Andromeda Strain remain the premier science-fiction novels and movies from 1966-1971. (By the way, 2001 and Andromeda both received G ratings while Fantastic Voyage got a PG, which only shows that Republicans have made significant advances today in their ability to complain about three seconds' worth of viewing a female cadaver's breast and soapy male butt cheeks -- so expect the same amount of complaints about the same number of seconds of soap-covered skin in the Sci-Fi Channel remake, which I review separately.) 4.5 stars.