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An enormously elaborate isolation centre called Project Wildfire has been hollowed out beneath the desert and prepared by the United States government in readiness for just such an event, and most of the film consists of the efforts of a hastily assembled research team wandering through its dazzlingly antiseptic rooms, trying to pin down the cause of the plague and to find a solution. Apparently it carries an unknown micro-organism picked up in space but, then again, it might have something to do with germ-warfare experiments. The Andromeda Strain tells the tale of an American satellite that crashes in New Mexico, followed shortly afterwards by the death of nearly everyone in the vicinity (except the old town drunk and a small baby). Wise and his scriptwriter Nelson Giddings – who also worked with Wise on The Haunting (1963) – decided to follow the novel as closely as possible and therefore reproduced its authenticity on the screen. Author Crichton had a solid medical background and, after graduating from Harvard University, he took a degree in medicine and later joined the Salk Institute. This makes a pleasant change from most genre films, where the scientific content is arbitrarily thrown in as an afterthought along with the ‘love interest’ and the ‘comic relief’. The Andromeda Strain is unusual among science fiction films in that real science is one of the most important factors in the development of the plot, in fact the recreation of scientific procedure is the plot. Two obsessions that often surfaced in seventies science fiction films were pollution and germ warfare, both of which tended to replace the atomic bomb as a source of exploitable material. An interesting and quite subtle illustration of all this is the underestimated The Andromeda Strain (1971) based on a novel by Michael Crichton – who soon after became a filmmaker himself, not to mention one of the best-selling authors of the late 20th century – and directed by Robert Wise, who had directed the classic The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951) two decades earlier. Whether or not this is true in real-life it remains central to science fiction, even in the original Star Trek, whose plots so often centred on Spock: Half soppy human, half unemotional Vulcan. It is as if the logic and rationality required to construct a technological world has dried up the warmer human emotions. Along with that goes a less obvious image, of the people who tend machines taking on machine-like characteristics themselves. The scientists methodically study the alien life form unaware that it has already mutated and presents a far greater danger in the lab, which is equipped with a nuclear self-destruct device should it manage to escape.” (courtesy IMDB)Įver since Metropolis (1927), the image of little people dwarfed by great big machines has been at the heart of science fiction cinema. Stone and his team – doctors Dutton, Leavitt and Hall – go to the facility, known as Wildfire, and try to first isolate the life form while determining why two people from Piedmont (an old wino and a six-month-old baby) survived. Many years prior to this incident, a group of eminent scientists led by Doctor Jeremy Stone advocated for the construction of a secure laboratory facility that would serve as a base in the event an alien biological life form was returned to Earth from a space mission. “When virtually all of the residents of Piedmont, New Mexico, are found dead after the return to Earth of a space satellite, the head of the US Air Force Project Scoop declares an emergency.