Who payed the critics

Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

This is ultimately a movie about the very bad things that can happen when we don't address our unease, when we just try to brush it off, whether that's to fit in or to preserve our self-image.

Quite probably one of the greatest Sci Fi movies of all time. I will agree that it doesn't have any men running around in tights with capes, or explosions. But the script is tight and the acting top notch. If you don't like this you don't like real Sci Fi, go ahead and re-watch an Iron-Man or Captain America film, there're all alike anyway.

Based on a Michael Crichton novel, and directed by Robert Wise, "The Andromeda Strain" opens in the town of Piedmont, New Mexico, where locals have been killed by an extraterrestrial pathogen. The film's creepy opening scenes watch as members of the US government investigate Piedmont's corpse-strewn streets, their hazmat suits and telescopic lenses suggestive of overwhelming danger and invisible menace.Nothing else in "The Andromeda Strain" approaches the unnerving brilliance of its first act. Instead the film follows a group of scientists into an underground research facility. Here they attempt to identify, categorise and neutralise the alien virus. Unfortunately, like Wise's "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" (1979), such scenes eventually get bogged down by lingering, Stanley Kubrick inspired shots of gear, computers and high-tech machinery. All superficial techno-details - Kubrick, in contrast, always blended metaphysics with the prosaic – Wise's aesthetic eventually sabotages what was once a promising premise.Wise directed "The Day the Earth Stood Still" in 1951, a scifi classic which reflected then contemporary fears of nuclear annihilation. A product of a different era, "The Andromeda Strain" (1971) plays like one of the decade's many anti-establishment, conspiracy thrillers. Paranoia becomes a survival mechanism, Nixon-era government officials conspire to drop bombs, and it is ultimately a secret military mission which delivers death on America's doorstep; whilst civilians nonchalantly go about their business, microscopic monsters scheme.7.5/10 – Worth one viewing. See "Contagion", "Day of the Dead", "Carriers", "The Crazies", "Rabid", "The Happening" and "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" (1978).

I am going to go as far as saying the movie is unique in every way. Where detail loses to generalization - this movie digs deep in the small details. Where the enemy of a "regular" sic-fi movie is a horror flick alien - here it is the horror of helplessness against an organism just some microns in size. Being slow-paced, showing attention to detail and carefully serving audience the more or less csi-like approach to science, minus the action and theatrics, makes this movie some kind of anomaly as if scientists were themselves to chose what *they* would like to see as an action movie, rather than being dictated what some people view science as ... and that could just as well be traced to old Frankenstein movies where "science" is a collection of random gadgets and stereotypical special effects. This is the kind of originality that sets Andromeda Strain apart, with a unique atmosphere and a very original approach to putting the viewer if not in the hot seat, then at the very least in a tense situation. I give it 6 points none the less, because I can see how this kind of movie will never have great appeal with the general audience.

Robert Wise directed this engrossing thriller based on a novel from Michael Crichton, about a team of four scientists(played by James Olsen, Arthur Hill, David Wayne, and Kate Reid) who try to isolate an extraterrestrial virus brought back to Earth by a satellite that crashed in Piedmont New Mexico, killing most of the residents, except an old(alcoholic) man, and a baby. The team try to find out the connection between such two entirely different people, in hopes it will lead them to a cure.Interesting and well-acted film is smart and effectively directed, with many nice touches, and a stark atmosphere in the decimated town, contrasted nicely with the clinical setting in the protective underground laboratory where they study the alien virus, which threatens the world if unleashed.