To me, this movie is perfection.

It is a performances centric movie

From my favorite movies..

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

The military finds most of the population of Piedmont, New Mexico dead. The town's doctor had found a satellite and opened it. Something is leaving everybody's blood clotted. The only survivors are an old alcoholic and a baby. Project Scoop declares an emergency to gather a group of eminent scientists in a facility rigged with a self-destruction nuclear device. Specimens, the satellite and the survivors are sent there. The scientists race to find the cause of the mass death.The movie is a bit dry. It's more in love with the technical aspects of this incident than the personal human aspects. It spends most of its time explaining technical procedures and scientific concepts. It ends up being too sterile but fascinating nevertheless.

The science behind "The Andromeda Strain" may be a big crock of hooey, but the people who made it do a good job of at least making it seem credible, which goes a long way toward making the film much more effective as a sci-fi thriller than others of its type.Robert Wise was a good, solid director. He had a distinctly mainstream sensibility as a filmmaker, but his mainstream films were always especially assured and intelligent. He does a great job keeping this talky sci-fi film moving, and it's really creepy, especially in this age when the media is just waiting to pounce on the THE BIG ONE, the deadly virus that's going to emerge and wipe out humanity. The ending to "The Andromeda Strain" is a bit easy -- the virus just evolves to become harmless and floats away in a big cloud -- and comes as a bit of a let down after all of the work the film does to create just an atmosphere of tense dread up to that point. But the rest of the movie is good enough that the limp ending doesn't make the rest of the film feel like a waste of time."The Andromeda Strain" was nominated for two Oscars, one for Best Art Direction (long-time Wise collaborator Boris Leven and William Tuntke) and Best Film Editing (Stuart Gilmore and John W. Holmes), both of which were strongly deserved.Grade: A-

This dull and dated sci-fi thriller, heavy on ponderous detail but light on action, is certainly not recommendable to those with short attention spans. What little special effects there are are limited to computer models on screens, and, even if they were cutting edge at the time, seem unbelievably primitive now.The basic premise, a space virus that wipes out and US town and the attempts by the country's best scientists to identify and quarantine the virus, is intriguing. But the script over-explains every painstaking scientific investigation to a point where it becomes like watching a boring lecture.Spoiler Alert.And after all this, the scientists are completely irrelevant to the solution! The virus itself mutates to a harmless form without any action from the scientists. An amazingly Un-Hollywood anticlimax.Worth watching if you are interested in 70s sci-fi.

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.