I'm a Robert Wise fan, but this wasn't his finest moment. This film has so much a movie of the week look to it that it's scary. All those zoom shots, the cheezy looking set constantly being redressed in various shades of color. The question that never got answered was this: Was the Government looking for microbic life in outerspace, or did it plant some kind of Earthborne life and allow it to mutate into something else? Imagine sending a scoup into orbit and hoping it will find a living form of matter 2 microns (2 million's of a meter)? Also the science is all wrong. The characters talk about intelligent life the size of a microbe. What a joke! It takes ten trillion neural connections in the human brain to make us intelligent, how do you suppose a microbe can manage that? Lastly, the dialog is punctuated by silence. A music score was needed for the pacing which is erratic. I knew Doug Trumbull (the last time I saw him was at a conference held at Windows on the World at the Trade Center a year before 9/11). He was still wet behind the ears and lost money on his special effects bid. Corners were cut and they show. This movie doesn't hold up as well as Forbidden Planet, made years before. The acting is wooden, the direction ill-conceived. It's a 130 minute waste of time and talent.
Review of The Andromeda Strain
The Andromeda Strain
(1971)
An Interesting Story Whose Cinematic Version Fails to Hold Up
14 March 2004