Sunday, 7 July 2024

I watch it so you don't have to: the Andromada Strain (1971)

I watched a thing and have thoughts, specifically how knowing the person behind it was a gigantic asshole changes how you view something.

The asshole this time is Michael Crichton, one of the most successful novelists of the 70s, 80s, and 90s. He was also a drawstring shitbag of a person. You can consult his wiki entry for specifics, but he was a person who basically got cancelled before the term existed entirely by his own efforts. My suspicion is that he was ruined by big success early on in life. By the time he finished his undergrad at Harvard he had accomplished his childhood dream: being a successful author. Dude then went to Harvard medical school, but was so successful by that time he did a residency but never practiced.  Maybe because of this, he seems to have decided personal growth was for other people.

The fact that his BA is in "biological anthropology" which was the name "scientific racism" had been living under likely doesn't help, though it does explain why he stormed off the set of the already questionable movie "Rising Sun", and never returned, when he discovered a white character was being played by Wesley Snipes.

Anyway, I recently saw the old SF movie the Andromeda Strain. It is a good movie, one of the VERY few good SF made between 2001 and Star Wars. The movie was adapted from Crichton's first novel, which was a huge success and established him as a bestselling author. It opens with a dead town in California, where a virus collected from space almost instantly strikes the entire town dead, with the only survivors being an infant and an alcoholic hobo. The government does what they do in a lot of MC novels, activate the best and most privlidged elite personnel they can find to Solve The Problem. So I assume they were all first in their class at harvard and yale, and then, I dunno, did post-doctorate work at places so elite I've never heard of them.

Good things first: this movie was directed by Robert Wise, and he knows what he is doing. The art direction, especially, is strong. The facility, 'Wildfire', is this fantasy take on one of those CDC labs that is capable of safely dealing with lethal infectious agents - I think it even has the same level 1 to 5 structure.  The lab features stainless steel everything, and exists as a five level subterranean donut. It also could be 'Chekov's Gun, the building' as pretty much every detail we're told about becomes part of the plot. The labs also feature really clever devices to make visually interesting very boring things (like for example the changing of a particulate filter) and has some early graphics that are computers in operation and *almost* computer graphics. So if you like a retro design, all of that is a joy. I should also say the central plot is in fact, pretty interesting and well done, being the only time I've seen speculative biochemistry as a major factor in a plot. Also I noticed the "PA/computer page sound" [I think] was sampled by one of my favourite musicians, Yoko Kanno, to create a track for a TV show some thirty years later.


Could be a coincidence, considering it is, after all, just two notes on a piano, but they are a really good, distinctive set of notes.

The characters are kind of a letdown, but then again they are four doctors doing intense research, so there's not a lot of leeway there. One of the doctors is AN FEMALE, and is written to be...exactly like a male doctor in their 50s in deportment and intellect. I forget if in the book Crichton just doesn't gender that character - I read the book as a teen and remember being genuinely surprised that the character was a lady - but this is about as close as Crichton gets for gender equity.

Eventually the Crichton surrogate figures things out and saves the day. This is where we get a whiff of the drawstring shitbag. The Crichton surrogate does this by 1) not comforting a crying baby (even when the female nurse really really wants to) and 2) by catching an omission the female doctor accidentally made. In what's a genuinely interesting plot development, the female doctor has been slowly developing epilepsy. I forget if the female doctor was aware of this - it's a subtle plot development in the book because we see the signs from her perspective, which naturally are fairly subtle and confusing. Once it comes out, another doctor speculates if she hid her condition to keep her position of privilege as a fourth level nesting doll. Still, at one point, thanks to the constant flashing lights and intense screens, they discover what neutralizes the mysterious strain, which is looked over because the female doctor is having a minor seizure. So it's partially the female doctor's fault, and it's the author surrogate's job to correct it.

The basic theme is one Crichton would use throughout his career: "science and technology are bad". [His other basic theme is "people's brains are bad because they want amusement" which is expressed mostly in plots about deadly futuristic theme parks, and I'm not kidding about his views on the brain, as you can check his wiki about how he "didn't trust his own brain."] The reason why science and technology is bad is, well, I'm just going to quote a friend here:

"It was always there - one of the core ideas in the Jurassic Park novel is that science is an unearned power because scientists inherit so much of their knowledge and thus don't respect it. With the specific analogy that science is like buying a Saturday Night Special instead of spending a lifetime mastering a martial art."

Very "while you played games, I studied the sword" if you spend too much time on the internet

You can certainly see this in the Andromeda Strain. The Wildfire facility breaks, as it must, as the entire movie is basically a mechanism for an exciting story. Really, the facility is also more than a little absurd. There's a nuclear bomb at the bottom of the facility, and it's clear that the magic computer system they use to do work is also being used to monitor the scientists, with the facility being able to vaporize itself in a sufficiently compromised situation, which has one scientist feverishly cutting AV feeds when the topic gets too dangerous. There's an extended series of scenes in the middle where the scientists go through ever more invasive decontamination, despite the fact that the scientists still must work in clean rooms etc. The baby spends about 90% of the movie wailing in a room with the semiconscious hobo, and both are transported very slowly through the facility on a very slow moving elevator. I'm guessing Crichton didn't pay much attention to what nurses did.

The real "you manics, you blew it all up" energy comes from the revelation that the virus was brought to earth via a space probe that was sampling stuff to create new bioweapons from. (Crichton is a victim of timing here: the movie came out in 1971, and Nixon had by that time terminated America's bioweapon program, for the extremely rational reason that bioweapons were as serious as nuclear weapons, and thus any situation you'd use them you'd be using nuclear weapons, which were frankly better.) Still, the movie ends with....no solutions whatsoever. That's not surprising if you know Crichton. Fear of science never has any resolution, in no small part because Crichton's books are engines of entertainment, amusement park rides, and so the problem being solved would undermine the whole enterprise.

Anyway, the movie is good, especially if you love yourself some 1970s futurism.

No comments:

Post a Comment