The Andromeda Strain (1971) on Netflix
A government satellite falls near Piedmont, New Mexico, and almost the whole town is found dead. Dr. Jeremy Stone leads a team to a secret laboratory to identify the organism it carried.
- Netflix3.6/5
- IMDb7.2/1044,771 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes67%
Trailer
Plot summary
An American satellite comes down near Piedmont, New Mexico, and nearly everyone in the town is found dead. A military recovery team sent for it also dies. Dr. Jeremy Stone leads a group of scientists to Wildfire, a secret underground laboratory in Nevada, to identify the organism the satellite carried. Two residents lived: Peter Jackson, an alcoholic, and Manuel Rios, a six-month-old baby. Stone and the surgeon Dr. Mark Hall want to know why.
Cast
- Kermit Murdockas Dr. Robertson
- Mark Jenkinsas Lt. Shawn (Piedmont team)
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Andromeda Strain (1971)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Screenwriter Nelson Gidding suggested making Dr. Leavitt female, and Wise at first was not enthusiastic, picturing a largely decorative character reminiscent of Raquel Welch's in Fantastic Voyage. He asked the opinion of a number of scientists, who were unanimously enthusiastic, and came to feel that Kate Reid's Dr. Leavitt was "the most interesting character" in the film.
- The Andromeda Strain was one of the first films to use advanced computerized photographic visual effects, with work by Douglas Trumbull, who had pioneered effects for 2001: A Space Odyssey. Reportedly $250,000 of the film's budget of $6.5 million was used to create the special effects.
- The science was staged for real where possible: real laboratory scenes using a spectrograph were shot at Caltech, and composer Gil Mellé recorded actual laboratory sounds for the film at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for authenticity while researching the score.
- Source author Michael Crichton makes a cameo appearance as a physician in the scene in which Dr. Hall is pulled from surgery to report to Wildfire.
- In the 1992 experimental feature Strain Andromeda The, video artist Anne McGuire re-edited the entire film shot-by-shot in reverse order of sequences.
