The COVID pandemic has given new relevance to an entire category of Science Fiction thrillers, and Robert Wise’s original tale of a ‘germ invasion’ from outer space is especially vivid. Michael Crichton’s novel tasks scientists Arthur Hill, David Wayne, James Olson and Kate Reid with cracking the secret of an alien life form — only to find that it can mutate into newer and deadlier forms. The new 4K edition brings new textures to Boris Leven’s bold color designs; Douglas Trumbull headed up sophisticated visual effects that mix film and video. “The suspense will last through your lifetime!”

The Andromeda Strain 4K
4K Ultra HD
Arrow Video
1971 / Color / 2:35 / 131 min. / Street Date May 13, 2025 / Available from Available at Arrow Video USA / 35.00
Starring: Arthur Hill, David Wayne, James Olson, Kate Reid, Paula Kelly, George Mitchell, Ramon Bieri.
Cinematography: Richard H. Kline
Production Designer: Boris Leven
Film Editors: Stuart Gilmore, John W. Holmes
Original Music: Gil Melle
Special Effects: James Shourt, Albert Whitlock, John Whitney Sr., Douglas Trumbull
Written by Nelson Gidding from the novel by Michael Crichton
Produced and Directed by Robert Wise

Welcome back to the ‘futuristic’ year of 1970, when screenwriters had just learned about computers that automatically answer all questions, and lab tests that deliver instanteous results. Michael Crichton broke into big-time writing and the film business with his very smart novel, packed with scientific and medical detail. Dougas Trumbull’s experts’ special effects breakthroughs were as big as anything in Stanley Kubrick’s  2001: A Space Odyssey.  The Andromeda Strain 4K is one of very few big-budget sci-fi thrillers that dared to follow Kubrick’s movie milestone.

Robert Wise’s previous Sci-fi effort was a home run — the superlative ’50s classic  The Day the Earth Stood Still. This movie also flatters the intelligence of its audience. Within its two hours of lofty technical exposition, Nelson Gidding’s screenplay again shows that movie science fiction was once a good barometer for America’s Cold War stance.

Arrow’s previous Blu-ray release from 6 years ago was from a 4K scan. This new disc gives it to us without a downconversion and with HDR.

The show begins similarly to the Cold War spy thriller  Ice Station Zebra. A resident of the tiny desert town of Piedmont, New Mexico foolishly retrieves and un-seals a satellite that has fallen to Earth. Launched by a classified program called ‘Project Scoop,’ the probe’s function is to search for life forms in outer space. Something the capsule picked up in orbit kills everyone in Piedmont within minutes. In response, military authorities scramble a special scientific-medical team to a classified location in Nevada where awaits a lavish, futuristic bio-lab called ‘Project Wildfire.’  It has been built specifically to fight a theoretical danger of contamination from extraterrestrial organisms.

Entering Piedmont in Hazmat suits, team leader Dr. Jeremy Stone (Arthur Hill) and surgeon Dr. Mark Hall (James Olson) locate the capsule and discover that its ‘space germ’  kills by turning human blood into a fine dry powder.  ↓  Even crazier, they find two unaffected survivors: the drunken old wino Jackson (George Mitchell) and a bawling baby boy. Why didn’t they die too?

Joining Stone and Hall at Wildfire are bio experts Drs. Charles Dutton (David Wayne) and Ruth Leavitt (Kate Reid). They must formulate a medical defense against a contagion like nothing ever known before. But first they have to isolate the alien organism — which may be no bigger than a microscopic stain inside the Project Scoop capsule.

The Andromeda Strain is a serious attempt at intelligent Science Fiction, a welcome rarity. In the place of silly gimmicks is a biological enigma, that the four scientist-heroes study as if it were a Sherlock Holmes mystery. The ‘Andromeda Strain’ is unlike any terrestrial life form. It is not even carbon-based.

Director Wise’s docudrama approach makes the dazzling super-lab seem even more futuristic. The first hour is spent rounding up a quartet of researchers and getting them to the bottom level of a secret lab in the Nevada desert. The research station is packed with fancifully extrapolated medical equipment. Each color-coded underground level is more sterile than the one above it. TV’s Star Trek had overdone spacey corridors, but Production Designer Boris Leven doubles down on the look, closely following the artwork of Robert Wise’s illustrator Maurice Zuberano. We almost wince at some of those primary colors. Project Wildfire’s working environments are so bright, they would drive people crazy.

Screenwriter Nelson Gidding works hard at details that humanize the proceedings.  ↑  Nurse Paula Kelly (Sweet Charity) has warmth and charm. The Sterno-pickled Piedmont survivor Jackson refuses to cooperate with the doctors and tries to bargain for booze and cigarettes. We recognize him as a smart take on the jolly drunk from the Sci-fi classic  Them! — his comic asides into the TV monitors are a welcome break from the sober tension elsewhere — why didn’t Jackson die?

The presence of the unaccountably still-living baby guarantees instant audience concern. This is Crichton’s most astute screenwriting ploy: mass casualties are part of the genre’s basic appeal, as described in a  noted essay by Susan Sontag. Sci-fi audiences won’t blink at the 64 dead citizens in Piedmont, but one cute, crying baby focuses the jeopardy at a personal level.

The actors playing the four scientists must attack the alien contagion with cold calculation, yet still project distinct personalities. Senior team member David Wayne has the lightest exposition burden and comes off best. Kate Reid carries most of the comedy; her Ruth Leavitt is a fountain of cynical remarks. Leavitt has concealed a medical condition that Project Wildfire’s security investigations ought to have uncovered; her problem ends up jeopardizing the mission.

Some critics thought the characterizations dull. Arthur Hill performs well as Dr. Stone, but expository duties prevent him from doing much more than explaining things non-stop to the other characters. James Olson’s Dr. Hall experiences some believable information overload. He at first misunderstands the function of the red key he’s been given, the one that defuses Wildfire’s built-in nuclear self-destruct bomb:

“No, no, you don’t set off anything — all you can do is stop it!”

Did 1971 audiences feel some of the same frustration?  Andromeda Strain dispenses so much information that those not paying attention are soon left behind.

The investigation of the dead town of Piedmont makes for a powerful opening. Its graphic imagery tops previous efforts in conveying the bleakness of mass slaughter through gas or biological agents. Like the naval officers in the doomsday movie  On the Beach, Olsen and Hill must don bulky bio-hazard suits; all they find at first are corpses. Wise and editor Stuart Gilmore make good use of multi-screen effects: live-action of the doctors peering into windows is displayed next to stills of what they see: dead bodies of every age and description. Static full-screen compositions remind us that Boris Leven executed William Cameron Menzies’ designs for the delirious classic  Invaders from Mars.

Multi-screen imagery was decorative in  The Thomas Crown Affair and added greatly to the suspense of  The Boston Strangler.  Andromeda Strain uses it to keep the Piedmont sequence from becoming too morbid. The editing takes an even bolder conceptual step. Dr. Stone’s later nightmare of Piedmont’s corpses also uses the split-screen technique. The screens show Dr. Stone’s imagination adding a ‘virtual’ vision of his worst fear, an image of his own wife back in Washington, dead. The multi-screen psychologizing is very effective.

Michael Crichton must have been a devoted Sci-fi buff. His book borrows concepts from classic-era Sci-fi movies, improving on most of them. Crichton’s biggest debt is owed to the English  Quatermass films, all of which involve biological contamination/colonization from outer space. That’s only a start.

At one point Dr. Stone orders a nuclear hit on Piedmont, but then must backpedal when his team decides that a bomb blast would spur the silicon-based Andromeda crystals to mutate in unknown ways.  That’s a direct quote from the clever alien invasion movie  Kronos, about a giant robot from outer space:  It FEEDS on energy!

A less clever plot complication sees Wildfire’s communications system disrupted by a mechanical glitch, a low-tech snafu similar to the one depicted in  Fail Safe, the WW3 shocker that lays the blame for Armageddon on machines instead of people. At one point Andromeda Strain resorts to an odd audio flash-forward that lets us hear two generals discussing what caused the Project Wildfire communications breakdown, in the past tense. The scene undercuts the drama by revealing that the world will not be destroyed. Editing games with jarring flash-forwards undermine audience satisfaction in two other movies from 1970-1971, Cornel Wilde’s  No Blade of Grass and Sidney Lumet’s  The Anderson Tapes.

Crichton’s Project Wildfire upgrades the super-secret military-industrial facilities depicted in earlier Sci-fi films. The underground desert lab in 1965’s  The Satan Bug is in fact a germ warfare development station, one with really pitiful security. The multi-level underground floor plan for Project Wildfire is copied straight from Ivan Tors’ 1954 thriller  GOG. Everything is the same: the secret desert location, the vertically-organized levels, a nuclear reactor that, to enhance the finale, threatens the entire establishment.

Crichton must have had ‘GOG on the brain.’  In the place of GOG’s scene of a scientist dodging a futuristic death-ray weapon, Dr. Hall must run a gauntlet of automated laser beams.

The Andromeda Strain also keeps pace with Cold War politics, a key component of much classic Sci-fi of the 1950s. An authority figure in George Pal’s original  Destination Moon states openly that America’s aim in space exploration is to militarily dominate the world. At one point in Andromeda, David Wayne’s Dr. Dutton stumbles onto a digital bio-warfare plan. He believes that the real purpose of Project Scoop may be to scour outer space for new biological weapons. In the bigger timeline of paranoid Sci-fi concepts, that’s quite a precedent. The idea disappeared for 8 years, until the Alien franchise arrived. It openly states that weapons researchers are searching for space monsters to convert to military purposes.

The movie retains Michael Crichton’s ingenious use of medical details to lend the story an air of authenticity. It also keeps Crichton’s somewhat limp non-conclusion: as the Andromeda ‘virus’ mutates to adapt to its new environment, it becomes harmless all on its own. Crichton’s substitute finale borrows the time-bomb countdown tension device introduced in Invaders from Mars. The gimmick worked — audiences loved the laser-ray chase in the Wildfire lab’s central air shaft. They understood Dr. Hall’s desperate attempt to reach the disarm station with his special red key.

Is The Andromeda Strain the dawn of the lazy writer / brilliant computer syndrome?  Wildfire’s computers are incredibly efficient for 1970. Whether it involves measuring growth on Petri dishes or the analysis of blood, the near-instant turnaround for data is remarkable. No matter the question, our scientist heroes click a few keys on a keyboard and the facts they need simply leap up at them. They pluck reliable info out of the air as nonchalantly as did Mr. Spock in TV’s  Star Trek.

Audiences didn’t recoil at the illogic of certain scenes, which is an endorsement for the film’s overall effectiveness. Project Wildfire’s support personnel are highly trained professionals, yet they balk like ignorant peasants when confronted by the possibility that Kate Reid might carry the Andromeda germ. At least they’re not a pack of crybabies, like the lily-livered astronauts in the now hilarious misfire  Marooned.

More odd logic: After wiping out Piedmont, Crichton’s space germ mutates to a second form. Just being in Earth’s environment made the mutation occur. The new mutation no longer coagulates blood, but instead dissolves human flesh and certain similarly structured plastics. A jet pilot and his ‘Polycron’ oxygen mask are reduced to bones and some metal fittings. When Dr. Dutton is later exposed, it appears that he is spared because the virus specimen in the lab has also mutated to Andromeda 2.0.  It attacks the Polycron plastic of the lab’s isolation seals, dissolving them as it did the pilot’s air mask. But what about Andromeda 2.0’s habit of eating human flesh? David Wayne isn’t bothered a bit.

The post mortem for Andromeda is also a bit on the pat side. It is neutralized by the acidic sea water, a gag associated with inconsistent monster movies like the Steve Sekely version of  The Day of the Triffids. How do we know that Andromeda won’t mutate again, and achieve a tolerance to a wider range of Ph?  Perhaps the educated Australian lady Lyz of the tech-savvy page  And You Call Yourself a Scientist! has the knowledge to explain all this to the ignorant CineSavant.

Other less critical gripes point up some of Crichton’s undeveloped story skills. Having the Wildfire lab be still under construction is an okay contrivance that allows the ‘Odd Man Out’ Dr. Hall to be nowhere near a disarm station when the nuclear destruct sequence starts. Would the military contractors really arm a nuclear bomb before all of the buttons to disarm it were installed?  Another shaggy plot device involves a paper wedgie screw-up that conveniently puts Wildfire out of communication with Washington — for more than a day. Even if the arrogant doofus in the radio room didn’t hear a bell, he’d certainly hear and see the reams of Teletype paper spilling onto the floor. And where are the standard communications checks that would start every new shift?    (I’m not really offended, but really.)

Another yawning plot hole is plugged with an awkward character contrivance.  ↑  Dr. Ruth Leavitt’s epileptic condition stalls the discovery of an obvious means for killing Andromeda, so Dr. Hall can intuit it at a more dramatic moment. Crichton’s obstructions to the scientists’ work make us think that, if Wildfire were just a little more organized, the nasty space bugs could have been defeated before lunchtime.

Universal and Robert Wise are to be commended — they alone attempted a quality Sci-fi epic in the wake of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Universal wasn’t so astute concerning the equally visionary and politically more interesting  Colossus: the Forbin Project. The film was delayed for almost two years, which seems a crazy commercial blunder. The sinister HAL-9000 had fully primed audiences for a thriller about a villainous computer.

The Andromeda Strain’s nod to Cold War security paranoia comes in the second or third scene. The audience I saw the movie with in 1971 laughed approvingly at the armed troops that round up the Wildfire team, and the Orwellian phone-tap intervention that blocks Mrs. Stone’s attempt to find out what’s going on.  Those government spies are messing around with our civil liberties, dude!  Until the advent of Watergate, national security claims outweighed the din of whining liberals. Those scenes then took on a more sinister tone. Perhaps when our country’s military-corporate leaders exhaust other bogus sources of fear, they will tell us they’re suspending our rights to protect us from germs from space.

Robert Wise has nothing to hide except Me and my Monkey.

A lab monkey is depicted being killed in the movie, and it’s very convincing. Wise asserts that the American Humane Association supervised the scene, and that the monkey wasn’t harmed. But maybe the word ‘harmed’ belongs in quotes: the monkey sure looks like it’s suffering. I once worked with Jon Bloom, a trailer company executive who had been an assistant to Robert Wise on Andromeda. He told me the whole story.

Robert Wise’s claim is true. The Humane Association approved the procedure and was present during filming. It was shot on a set that was sealed airtight and filled with carbon dioxide. The whole crew wore scuba gear. The monkey’s glass cage was also airtight — it contained normal air. The mechanical arm put the cage on the table, and opened its door. The monkey immediately could not breathe. In a few seconds it fell unconscious, as seen in the film. Assistant director James Fargo was in his scuba outfit just off camera. As soon as the monkey was still for a couple of seconds, he rushed in and fed it oxygen while carrying it out of the set. A reflection of Fargo in motion can be seen, just before the shot cuts away. The monkey revived immediately. There was only one take.

The monkey demonstrates what death by a bio-agent might be like, and it looks undeniably real. Jon feels that the scene was needed because audiences otherwise would only hear a lot of talk about what deadly germs might do. Along with the crying baby, the monkey expresses the consequences of an invisible ‘monster,’ one impossible to depict directly.

It’s nice that the monkey didn’t actually die, but we can see it suffer as it chokes into unconsciousness. Because we kill so many animals elsewhere in daily life, for so many reasons, I’m not sure where this scene lies on the spectrum of animal cruelty. Respect for any kind of life is given such short shrift in this world that animal activists must face a tough uphill struggle. That little monkey’s cousins may have been sacrificed by the thousands for important medical research, or perhaps for frivolous cosmetics testing.

Arrow Video’s 4K Ultra HD of The Andromeda Strain is billed as a 4K restoration from the original camera negative, produced by Arrow Films. As stated above, it is likely the same 4K remaster done in 2019, without the downconversion to Blu-ray. It looked great on Blu and it looks a bit different here, with a heightened range of contrast and color hues. I like it better, especially those lab scenes in which entire walls and tubular corridors are the same primary color: the more sensitive color range makes the red walls look less like flat fields of color, with more variation in texture. It’s a small thing, but Andromeda does belabor the cliché of antiseptic, ‘futuristic’ decor.

Gil Mellé’s eccentric electronic music score still stands out. The original soundtrack lp came in a hexagonally-shaped novelty album cover, to mimic the form of the film’s crystalline germ.

Selected older disc extras have been ported over. The vintage docu is a thorough tour through the making of the film guided by Robert Wise and Nelson Gidding. Wise passed away in 2005; I edited several docu interviews with him for his big musical  West Side Story.  He starts with the old commercial babble that Sci-fi fans hate,  ‘It’s not Science Fiction, it’s Science Fact‘.  But Wise’s recall of detail is excellent.

Effects master Douglas Trumbull sketches the specifics of his and Jamie Shourt’s brilliantly achieved visuals depicting the crystalline Andromeda organisms as seen by a high-powered microscope (an electron microscope?). Their custom-designed high resolution television screens explored technology later developed to transfer video to film, and vice-versa. This movie was Doug Trumbull’s entry into effects as they were done in the real industry, as opposed to the dream factory, sky-is-the-limit situation of 2001. He acknowledges his admiration for the experts that preceded him. Trumbull named one of his daughters Andromeda after this movie, by the way.

In an older interview, Michael Crichton volunteers stories of his days as a tyro writer and his first movie deal. One thing he doesn’t say is that his ‘original’ crystal alien microorganisms were proposed and depicted (almost identically!) way back in 1955, in Walt Disney’s landmark space exploration TV series episode  Mars and Beyond.

Of the extras from 2019 the best is a lengthy discussion by the smooth talking, quick-thinking Kim Newman, who accurately associates The Andromeda Strain with movies about plagues and pandemics, and other monsters alien and domestic that spread their havoc in a plague-like manner. We find the subject fascinating and Newman does a bang-up job of it.

While at UCLA and working as a movie usher, my theater manager gave me my very own ‘Wildfire Disarm Key’ for a souvenir!  The film had played the year before at National General’s fancy Westwood Theater, and all the ushers were given red keys to wear as a promotional gimmick. I’ve worn mine once or twice, but have yet to have anybody come up and say,  ‘so where’s the bomb, Glenn?’  Donations to help soothe Savant’s hurt feelings may be sent at any time, no questions asked.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

The Andromeda Strain 4K
4K Ultra HD
rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements:
Audio commentary by critic Bryan Reesman
A New Strain of Science Fiction, a new appreciation by critic Kim Newman
The Andromeda Strain: Making The Film, a featurette from 2001 featuring interviews with director Robert Wise and screenwriter Nelson Gidding
A Portrait of Michael Crichton, a featurette from 2001 featuring an interview with author Michael Crichton
“Cinescript Gallery,” highlights from Gidding’s annotated, illustrated shooting script
Trailer, TV spots & radio spots
Image gallery
Illustrated collector’s booklet featuring an essay by Peter Tonguette.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One 4K Ultra HD in Keep case
Reviewed: May 10, 2025
(7326andr)

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