The Adromeda Strain

Saw The Adromeda Strain (thanks, Chris!) It was a sort of throw-back-ey hard scifi. The idea is that a satellite lands in a town and everybody dies. We don't see them die, we see them dead. The government scoops up four scientists in a fun gathering of the troops montage and brings them to a super-secret-n-secure bio-weapons lab. There they study the satalite to discover what about it makes it so toxic. The film is filmed and plotted like a 1950s science fiction, with every scientist wearing a government-issue pair of horn-rim glasses and every tech wearing a monochrome jumpsuit. The men are lumpy, the women mom-ishly attractive. Everybody acts in a very clenched, subdued way. There's little drama or hysterics for me to chew over, but there's interesting imaginary science going on.

It's interesting to watch the alien bacteria be subjected to tests and to watch the scientists just use giant pieces of machinery. They throw the lingo around in the super-precise but kind of corny way that scientists used to always speak. I must say it's refreshing to not have the scientists be arrogant assholes or wild-eyed hippie-wizards. These are normal, almost boring, people earnestly working on solving a problem. Their excitement/fascination is palpable and contagious and they're fun to watch. Of course the climax has them running around Chekhov's nuclear warhead comes into play, but I guess we need something to offset all the conversation.

In spite of the tech-fetishism on display, the film seems to be kind of Jurassic-Park-ianly dismissive of mankind's mastery over nature. Several times little faults manifest in huge failures, which is usually a way of forcing us to admit we can't account for everything. Okay, whatever. There's also an incongruously freaky scene where the virus 'kills' a rhesus monkey. It looked real enough that I had to pause the movie and make sure that I didn't just see a monkey be murdered for my dry entertainment (the monkey is okay. It was suffocated by carbon dioxide and revived immediately afterwards, but it convulses and weakly flails and really looks dead, my friends. It's a creepy scene.) That scene aside (which anyway seems to have come from an alternate universe where David Lynch directed this) the film is sleepy but interesting and I recommend it to any budding super-scientist. Its dark themes aside, it's kind of inspirational.