12/8/2022 0 Comments Andromeda strain movie plot![]() ![]() For all the scientific detail that goes into The Andromeda Strain, it is also a very pessimistic film. Yet for all his impressive flourishes of hard science, Michael Crichton is a rampant technological alarmist who fears that we have created systems that have become so sophisticated that they are going to go out of control and destroy us. Indeed, the science and detail in Crichton’s books always eclipses his human characters, which are wooden. He loves technology – his books come heavily researched and filled with graphs and diagrams. A weird dichotomy runs through Michael Crichton’s work. The Wildfire scientists – (l to r) Kate Reid, David Wayne, James Olson, Arthur HillĪmid this, Michael Crichton was a prophet of anti-science sounding single-note polemics about the dangers of rampant technology. Kennedy’s post-War boom, society had fallen in underneath America, had become fractured and divided by political assassinations, youth riots, Vietnam and the Age of Love and its radical challenge to the dominant social paradigm. The problem was that at the time of the Moon Landing, which had been a vision of Camelot and John F. Contrarily though, instead of celebrating this triumph, 2001 and the host of films that followed and took up its themes throughout the 1970s – the likes of Planet of the Apes (1968) and sequels, THX 1138 (1971), Silent Running (1972), Zardoz (1974), Phase IV (1974), The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) and all of Michael Crichton’s work – turned away and saw the future and outer space as inhospitable, while becoming overwhelmed by the pessimistic belief that the world was doomed by self-destruction and overpopulation, even that the animal kingdom was rebelling against us. 2001 came at the height of the Space Age, a time where it seemed that the whole of science-fiction’s yearning to reach outward to the stars was about to be achieved by the Moon Landing. The Andromeda Strain came out at the peak of a wave of science-fiction films that began with 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). He published a number of other novels and cinemas saw an adaptation made of his The Terminal Man (1974), before he made his directorial debut with the tv movie Pursuit (1972) and then went on to direct the theatrical release of the highly successful Westworld (1973) and several subsequent films (see below). Michael Crichton was then able to ride a considerable wave of success in the 1970s on the basis of The Andromeda Strain. The film of The Andromeda Strain was a big hit – one of the biggest science-fiction hits in the pre- Star Wars (1977) blockbuster era. Crichton graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1964, became a doctor and then published the novel version of The Andromeda Strain (1969), which duly became a best-seller and was then adapted into this film.(Although he had earlier published five crime novels under the pseudonym John Lange). The Andromeda Strain is where Michael Crichton’s name became known.
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