August 13, 2022 4 min to read

The Andromeda Strain

The suspense will last through your lifetime.

PLOT

The story unfolds in flashback, told by Dr. Jeremy Stone as he testifies before the United States Senate Committee on Space Sciences in 1971:

After a U.S. government satellite crashes near the small rural town of Piedmont, New Mexico on February 5, nearly all the residents are dead. A military recovery team from Vandenberg Air Force Base tries to recover the satellite but is unsuccessful. Suspecting that the satellite has brought back an alien organism, the military activates an elite team of scientists.

Wearing protective suits, Dr. Stone, the team leader, and Dr. Mark Hall, a surgeon, are dropped into Piedmont by helicopter. They discover the town’s doctor opened the satellite in his office and that all of his blood has crystallized into a powder. They soon discover that almost all of the town’s victims’ blood has crystallized, causing rapid death. Two other townspeople have committed suicide after going insane. Stone and Hall retrieve the satellite and find two survivors, a 69-year-old alcoholic man named Peter Jackson and a six-month-old crying infant, Manuel Rios.

In addition to Stone and Hall, the elite team also includes Dr. Charles Dutton and Dr. Ruth Leavitt, who are summoned to a top-secret Nevada underground facility, code named Wildfire. Upon arrival, they undergo extreme decontamination procedures, descending through four disinfection levels to a fifth level where laboratories are located. This underground lab complex has sophisticated technology, including CRT computer displays and lasers. If the organism threatens to escape, the Wildfire facility includes an automatic nuclear self-destruct mechanism to incinerate all infectious agents. Under the “odd man hypothesis”, Dr. Hall is entrusted with the only key that can deactivate the device, the theory being that an unmarried male is the most dispassionate person within a group to make critical decisions in a crisis.

By examining the satellite with powerful cameras, the team discovers the microscopic alien organism causing the deaths in New Mexico. The greenish, throbbing life form is assigned the code name “Andromeda.” Inhaled through the lungs, Andromeda kills biological life almost instantly via a blood clot in the brain and blood clotting causing asphyxiation. It appears to be highly virulent. The team studies the organism using animal subjects, an electron microscope, and culturing in various growth media in an attempt to learn how it behaves. The microbe contains chemical elements required for terrestrial life (hydrogen and carbon) and appears to have a crystalline structure, but lacks the DNA, RNA, proteins, and amino acids present in all forms of terrestrial life, and directly transforms energy to matter with no discernible byproducts. Hall tries to determine why the two Piedmont residents survived.

A military jet crashes near Piedmont after the pilot radios that his plastic oxygen mask is dissolving. Meanwhile, Dr. Stone, who created the Wildfire laboratory, is accused by Dutton and Leavitt of designing the lab for biological warfare research. Unknown to other team members, Leavitt’s research on the germ is impaired by her undisclosed epilepsy.

Hall realizes that the alcoholic Jackson survived because his blood was acidic from drinking Sterno, and that the baby lived due to his blood being too alkaline from constant crying, suggesting that the organism, Andromeda, can survive only within a narrow range of blood pH. Just as he has this insight, the organism mutates into a non-lethal form that degrades synthetic rubber and plastics. Andromeda escapes the containment room into the lab where Dutton is working. Once all the laboratory’s seals start decaying due to Andromeda’s escape, a five-minute countdown to nuclear destruction is initiated.

Hall rescues Leavitt from an epileptic seizure, triggered by the flashing red lights of Wildfire’s alarm system. Meanwhile, the team realizes that the microbe would thrive on the energy of a nuclear explosion and would consequently be transformed into a super-colony that could destroy all life on Earth. Hall races against the laboratory’s automated defenses to reach a station where he can disable the nuclear bomb with his key. He endures multiple attacks by automated lasers as he climbs through the laboratory’s central core. He finds a working station, disables the bomb with seconds to spare, and collapses.

Hall awakens in a hospital. His colleagues reveal that clouds are being seeded over the Pacific Ocean, which will cause rain to sweep Andromeda from the atmosphere and into alkaline seawater, rendering it harmless. Stone finishes testifying to a U.S. senator by saying that while they were able to defeat the alien pathogen, they may be unable to do so in the future. The film ends with a computer feed suddenly stopping and the computer flashing the number “601”, the Wildfire code for information coming in too fast to analyze.