Violence/Gore: James Olsen takes a few laser hits at the end, and much earlier we see an arm cut open to reveal powdered blood.

Sex/Nudity: There’s a brief shot or two of a dead topless woman in Piedmont, if that’s your idea of a good time.

Best Line: “Establishment gonna fall down go boom.”

Score:

“There’s a fire.” With those words begins the race to save the Earth from a marauding alien virus that kills almost instantly, turns the blood to powder, and just might mutate into a cloud-like super-colony capable of spreading across the entire planet. The sobering revelation that we brought it on ourselves - you’ll find out why somewhere around the third act - doesn’t change the fact that the fate of humanity rests in the hands of one small team of scientists working in a secret underground lab code-named Wildfire. If they can’t find a way to stop the Andromeda Strain, there is no hope.

The first film to adapt a Michael Crichton novel is a masterpiece of understatement and design. First, by casting a largely unfamiliar collection of character actors well-known for their skill if not their faces, the movie manages a level of verisimilitude that wouldn’t be possible if Burt Reynolds or Steve McQueen had turned up in the medical jumpsuits. Then too the set design and technical jargon - almost all fictional despite its seeming accuracy - places the viewer within a claustrophobic environment whose layout and procedures are carefully illustrated for the audience to complete the immersive illusion. The effect is undeniably involving, and as a result we can follow the investigation of the deadly Andromeda without distraction from the documentary-like reality of the dilemma.

For fans of procedural storytelling - which, thanks to the likes of LAW AND ORDER and CSI, now seems to include 99 percent of the US population - this movie is a delight, concerning itself entirely with the lockstep process of analyzing and deducing the nature of the potential plague while eschewing extraneous character development, apart from the necessary thumbnail personalities that are needed to drive the plot forward. In particular, Kate Reid’s Dr. Leavitt is the only character who really gets a chance to emote, and her anti-establishment tendencies neatly counterpoint the stodgy button-down sensibilities of team leader Dr. Stone, as played by Arthur Hill. Our hero, James Olson, plays Dr. Hall as the odd man out - a simple, sensitive doctor, thrust into a situation far beyond his usual experience. David Wayne gets a chance to shine as Dr. Dutton in a tense scene late in the film when his character just might be infected with the eponymous Strain.

The movie’s biggest strength is that it resists all the action thriller cliches that may not necessarily have been institutionalized at that point but would certainly have been included in any version of this story produced a decade or so later. True, there’s a last-minute run to shut down the obligatory self-destruct system, a hoary old sci-fi standard that still gets trundled out for every new STAR TREK movie. But even that attempt to inject some physical activity into the proceedings comes very late in the game and is played with surprisingly little fanfare. The tone is still pretty quiet and the pacing methodical, keeping in synch with the rest of the movie; So much the better. One last nice touch is the eerie final sequence that doesn’t leave the viewer with much comfort, which of course is exactly the point. “Precisely, Senator. What do we do?” Brr.

DVD Extras: The original theatrical trailer, a portrait of Michael Crichton, and a brief but very informative making-of featurette that finally - FINALLY! - answers my long-standing question: How did they get that monkey to look like he was dying of Andromeda? The answer is a bit more disturbing than I expected. But why didn’t they include the complete original 1970s featurette instead of just giving us a few tantalizing glimpses of it in the new documentary? That’s a shame.

ATB