Allow yourself to be seduced for a moment by that plastic environment, which is air-conditioned and indirectly lighted and self-monitoring and automated and God knows what else, and ask yourself if this is really the direction human interior decorating is moving in, or if the Holiday Inn has been wrong.Tony Mastroianni Review Collection 'The Andromeda Strain' is superior science-fiction Cleveland Press May 15, 1971Ĭreatures from outer space are still the basic stuff of science-fiction thrillers. But if you find yourself experiencing 'Andromeda' on only the story level, pull back for a moment and watch those people and those machines. On the level of fiction, 'The Andromeda Strain' is a splendid entertainment that will get you worried about whether they'll be able to contain that strange blob of alien green crystal. Sometimes movies come along with buried levels, and I think this is one. But when the going gets tough, they become abstract and machine-like even toward each other. They occasionally lapse into humanity (particularly in the case of Kate Reid, as a crusty lady biologist of a certain age). What's fascinating is the way the humans pick up the computer state of mind. No such effort is made to humanize the computer in 'Andromeda,' and they go about their business with the efficiency of a Honeywell salesman. Their relationship with the computers that run Wildfire is, if anything, more intimate than the friendship between HAL 9000 and his human colleagues in '2001.' HAL was a computer intelligent enough to think, but he 'related' with humans in a folksy sort of way that made him half-palatable. The human characters almost seem an embarrassment to the Wildfire Project, a hermetically sealed laboratory on five levels below ground. 'The Andromeda Strain' does that absolutely brilliantly. '2001' put all that behind, and made it necessary for science-fiction movies (ambitious ones, at least) to create a plausible environment. The low in these matters was reached with Captain Video on the old DuMont network, whose ship actually rocked up and down as it sailed the sea of space, which presumably had waves just like the ocean.

We're asked to believe that our heroes are somewhere beyond Alpha Centuri and picking up steam, but their control panel looks like a 1949 Studebaker that's dropped acid.

One of the problems with science-fiction movies has always been the hardware.

The andromeda strain book review