I guess lasers were so high tech no one would know the difference, particularly if the other scientist says over the intercom, ‘That’s the effect of shock!’ while the guys slows down and his view goes all wonky. But in the movie, they still play the reaction to getting hit by the lasers as if the victim were drugged. That makes sense that the lasers in the book were actually drugged darts. These are the kind of old classics that a real joy to (re)discover. That freaked me out a long time ago! So there was a nice bit of recall that gave the scene some weight when I would have normally been clucking disapprovingly.īut overall, it was a great bit of hard sci-fi, almost the perfect opposite of Sunshine in some way, and its perfect complement in others. It helps, however, that as I was watching it, I remembered being a kid and seeing the scenes with a laser burning someone’s hand and face.
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The space goo jerking around is kind of funny, and lordy, the climax is like something out of some low-budget TV show or an episode of Star Trek. Like Sunshine, the final act gets a little goofy. These actors do struggle a bit to get their heads around some of the exposition, but after Sunshine’s crew of superpretty astronauts, I really liked going back to 1971 when the world didn’t have to be so young and shiny. They’re like Real Actual Scientists, and not just Actors Playing Scientists. Three old dudes, and one middle-aged abrasive chick. It’s clean, expressive, and effective: here is hard science, no fooling around!įinally, there’s the cast. Some of the establishing shots of stenciled lettering might as well be title cards. Robert Wise does a wonderful job playing with color, and costumes, and even writing on the walls during these sequences. There are even copious diagrams to give it all a sense of place.
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It’s part Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, with probably thirty minutes or more of the cast working its way down through a series of color-coded levels to the final underground lab. This is hard science, dammit! Which makes it all the more eerie.Īnd then the movie goes underground, with a great color-coordinated, gadget-heavy sequence about the complication of sterilizing a human body. Two men in containment suits moving through an infected town makes for an incredibly surreal sequence, all the more surreal for the fact that there aren’t going to be any zombies coming after them. The visuals of the locations are also great. These are effective bits of scientific storytelling, anchored with strong visuals instead of just rattled off like so much exposition. Robot arms and containment suits connected by accordian airways are featured prominently. The camera loves that machine! The movie loves showing us how air hoses are hooked up to rat cages.
A machine that swaps in air filters ranging from 100 angstroms to 2 microns. There’s a sequence in Andromeda Strain that shows a scientist measuring the size of the infection and its means of transmission. Much like Kubrick was obviously fascinated with his spaceships, Andromeda Strain is fascinated with the lab equipment donated by JPL (it’s worth noting that Douglas Trumball worked on both movies, and may be party to their hardware fetishes). However, they’re a definitely strong point in Andromeda Strain, even when it’s dated (the computer stuff is particularly klunky in a TRS-80 kind of way). They’re both very reliant on state-of-the-art visuals and they both veer off in a slightly crazy direction for their finales.įirst of all, as you’d expect, the visuals are very different. They’re controlled unfoldings of scientific details, with a small close-quarters cast, played mostly in tightly contained environments. This was a Robert Wise movie based on Crichton’s novel, so it’s admittedly from a very different time and source than Danny Boyle’s sizzling stylish sci-fi thriller.īut they both have similar subject matter. I watched Andromeda Strain via Netflix’s streaming library (which works wonderfully, BTW!), and was struck by how differently a “hard” sci-fi tale was told back in 1971, as opposed to Sunshine in 2007.