The Andromeda Strain

The Andromeda Strain

Robert Wise’s “The Andromeda Strain” is a pretty good work of science fiction, but I just can’t get into that kind of thing today.

What I find most interesting about the film, though, is its visual design which seems to have taken up where the interiors of the space station in “2001: A Space Odyssey” left off. We live in a world of smoothly, endlessly curving womblike plastic, with here a knob and there a computer read-out screen, and we get the sensation not so much that we’re watching action take place in this universe as that we are continuous inhabitants of it; it’s like living inside one of those new Otis elevators.

One problem with science-fiction movies has always been hardware. We’re asked to believe our heroes are somewhere beyond Alpha Centuri and picking up steam, but their control panel looks like a 1949 Studebaker that’s dropped acid. The low point was Captain Video on the old DuMont network; his ship actually rocked up and down as it sailed the sea of space which presumably had waves just like Earth’s sea.

“2001” put all that behind us; it made necessary for science-fiction movies (ambitious ones, at least) to create plausible environments. “The Andromeda Strain” does this absolutely brilliantly; indeed, if I were designing an ad campaign for the movie I would simply tell people they have never seen anything like Wildfire before. The human characters almost seem an embarrassment to Wildfire Project a hermetically sealed laboratory on five levels below ground because although they move around and speak English they could as easily be automatons along with everything else in there.

Their relationship with the computers that run Wildfire is more than friendly or anything else you want to call it; it is more intimate even than HAL 9000′s relationship with his human colleagues in “2001.” HAL was a computer intelligent enough to think, but he “related” with humans in a folksy sort of way that made him half-palatable.

No such attempt is made in “Andromeda”; the computers go about their business with the efficiency of a Honeywell salesman and so do the people. But the humans have picked up something from the computer state of mind; they occasionally lapse into humanity (especially Kate Reid, as a crusty lady biologist of a certain age), but mostly they are abstract and machine-like even toward each other.

Sometimes movies come along with buried levels, and I suspect this is one. On the story level, on the level of fiction, “The Andromeda Strain” is simply a narrative which works well and has some good moments like that scene where George Mitchell stands around for several minutes while the air drains out of his suit. But if you find yourself experiencing “Andromeda” on only this level, pull back for a moment and watch those people and those machines; allow yourself to be seduced for an instant by that plastic environment which is air conditioned and indirectly lighted and self-monitoring and automated and God knows what else and ask yourself if this isn’t really the direction human interior decorating is headed in or else if Holiday Inn has been wrong all these years.

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