Michael Crichton always had a gift for assembling pop science into dialogue that easily ‘talked the talk’ – even if its accuracy tended to stumble when observed too closely. They are professional, highly capable, and generally sound very convincing when discussing the crisis. The team of scientists enlisted to handle the threat bring with them a surprisingly strong sense of authenticity. The film’s opening act is a deeply unnerving one as an entire town is found lying dead on the street and in their homes the only survivors a rambling alcoholic and a crying baby. The Andromeda Strain really does feel relevant to today’s real-life pandemic, representing as it does an uncontrolled outbreak of a new and unknown virus. The US military brings an emergency plan into effect, pulling four scientists out of their homes late in the evening and transporting them to an underground facility in the desert: the ultimate in secure laboratories. Within minutes this initial team is dead as well. They find the entire town dead killed by an unknown lethal pathogen collected by the satellite while in the Earth’s orbit. When a government satellite crashes into a small New Mexico town, a team is dispatched for retrieval.

It focuses on scientists doing their jobs, running against the clock to crack the nature of the threat and to find a cure for it.

Based on the Michael Crichton novel of the same name, it foreshadowed not only the boom in similar Crichton adaptations two decades later but also an entire genre of similar virus-affected thrillers. It seems either fitting, then – or perhaps deeply inappropriate – to revisit Robert Wise’s 1971 science fiction thriller The Andromeda Strain.

2020 has been one hell of a year, with the world facing an ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

The andromeda strain book