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Here his style is nothing like his earlier work and is highly experimental. Robert Wise’s direction is also an interesting example of the trends at the time. The Andromeda Strain‘s soundtrack is unrelentingly bleak and claustrophobic, almost every bar suggesting something scary or terrifying and alien. If Jerry Goldsmith led the way with his atonal work on The Satan Bug and Planet of The Apes, it was Gil Mellé, best known for composing the theme to Kolchak: The Night Stalker, who took the concept and ran with it. The real stars of the film are the music and the direction.
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They’re also good enough actors to make you believe they’re scientists (unlike, say, Denise Richards in a certain James Bond film I could mention). As well as being a nice change from the normal, that also lends an extra air of credibility to the movie, since no one’s manoeuvring for position or top billing. They look, well, like a bunch of scientists. The cast of The Andromeda Strain weren’t stars. What marks it out of the ordinary is its recreation of the book’s verisimilitude and claustrophobia. A team of scientists specially chosen for their probable ability to deal with a harmful extraterrestrial virus is hastily called into action.Īnd that, pretty much, is the plot: a bunch of scientists running experiments. It starts, like the book, with the wiping out of a small town’s populace after a satellite falls to Earth. The Andromeda Strain, however, is probably the most scientific of all of them – unnecessarily so, in fact – and actually marked the beginning of the end for intelligent mainstream sci-fi, the end being marked by Star Wars.ĭirected by Robert Wise, who also directed the 1950s classic The Day The Earth Stood Still, The Andromeda Strain is a faithful recreation of Crichton’s novel, faults and all. In a sense, it was one of the heralds for first Planet of the Apes, then 2001, then a whole slew of 60s and 70s movies (eg Soylent Green, Rollerball) which while not desperately scientific at all times, did their level best to be intelligent movies that tried to discuss philosophical ideas as realistically as possible. The Andromeda Strain‘s filmic predecessor, The Satan Bug, was very much a thriller at heart, but it was a movie that tried to be scientific, something that helped it stand out from many of its predecessors, especially the B-movies of the 50s. It was such a huge hit that the film rights were snapped up almost instantly and a hugely well budgeted movie was put into production within minutes of the deal being closed. The publishers lapped it up and in 1969 the book became a huge international bestseller. He did everything he could to make it appear that his book was a true, scientific account of a dangerous accident that had occurred and only just been made public. He included excerpts from letters, government reports and congressional records that he’d completely fabricated. He included a fake bibliography with references to non-existent articles in scientific journals. Among that particular book’s many virtues was its use of the “ false document” technique to make it seem like the events in the book had actually happened: car requisition forms, field reports – all the mundane trivia of spy work included for the sake of verisimilitude.Ĭrichton instantly rewrote his book, The Andromeda Strain, to encompass the technique, something he’s done with almost every single book he’s written since (cf Jurassic Park, in particular).
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Then, one day, he read The Ipcress File by Len Deighton (also adapted into a “movie you should own” starring Michael Caine). Based largely on his student lectures, it was about a killer virus from outer space that scientists had to stop from wiping out the population. He wanted to be an author, but despite his already having published some short stories under a pseudonym, no one wanted to buy the book he had written. Once upon a time, there was a medical student called Michael Crichton.