'THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN'.......QUARANTINE-AGERS

The Andromeda Strain (1971)    In director Robert Wise's 1951 sci-fi classic "The Day The Earth Stood Still" alien peacekeeper Klaatu warned Earth to knock it off with the nukes or face incineration......

            20 years later, Wise brought back a new kind of alien visitor......a microscopic germ picked up by one of our biological space probes.....

             No warning this time.......this germ doesn't practice diplomacy.  It goes about its business, floating through the air and wiping out the tiny population of a desert town, turning their blood to dust.......

             Wise's film, taken from from the bestseller by young doctor Michael Chrichton, at first seems to take an awestruck, impressive view of the government, military and scientific communities as they mobilize to confront the mean little germ from outer space.....

              Gil Melle's  all-electronic score nervously hums and throbs as the scientific-medical team (Arthur Hill, Kate Reid, David Wayne, James Olson) assembles and hobnobs at the film's primary showpiece.......the Wildfire Lab dug deep underground in the Nevada desert......

              After a few little pungent, skit-like scenes explaining how such a monumentally expensive project like Wildfire skated right over Congressional oversight, the movie gets down to business......as our intrepid team of docs prepare to do battle with the Badass Bacteria From Beyond The Stars....(our preferred alternate title.....)

              Almost the entire first half of the film is devoted to the lab's endless antiseptic decontamination procedures, including burning off the outside layer of everybody's skin......(Kate Reid, tasked with the job of Sarcastic Comedy Relief Character, has whatever limited fun she can glean by snapping quips at her fellow actors and the sci-fi trappings she must endure....)

               Let's just say, by 1971 we've come a long way from Dr. No's procedure of slopping some soap suds on Sean Connery and Ursula Andress to clean 'em up.......

              The Wildfire Lab itself is a gleaming, polished futuristic romper room, along the lines of Kubrick's space station from '2001'......and fully equipped to nuke itself into oblivion if any pesky galactic fungi gets out of control.  (It doesn't occur to anybody until the very last minute that blowing the place up would spread the outer space pestilence into the atmosphere......)

              Ah well.....that's the government for you. And yet amid all the technological splendor, the movie throws in a plot glitch we dearly adore......in which the gazillion-dollar lab's communication with the outside world is cut off by a small piece of scrap paper stuck in the old-fashioned alarm bell that announces incoming messages.......

               In 1971, nobody had a smart phone to text "where the hell r u guys, what r u up 2??!!"

               None of that diminishes our thorough enjoyment of "The Andromeda Strain"......a slick, gleaming tribute to modern science from a master craftsman of a director. We even still stay on edge during the now-ancient "....10 seconds to self-destruct...." sequence.  (47 years ago, it was still a fairly fresh suspense picker-upper.....)

               So the BQ says to shower up with hand sanitizer, zip up your Hazmat suits and expose yourself to "The Andromeda Strain"......(and we don't mean that in any Harvey Weinstein way).....4 decontaminated stars (****)......(if there's ever a remake, we can't wait to see the scientists explain the lab costs to a bi-partisan committee.....)