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This all serves to make her annoying, and none of the other characters are much better. I'm glad the script makes her epilepsy more consequential by having it be the reason a crucial detail is missed, but it also makes her failure to disclose it harder to forgive, even as it is more reasonable that a female scientist at the dawn of the sexual revolution would hide it.
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Leavitt into a woman is a good choice and makes her character more interesting, but she is also made far too caustic and cynical to be relatable. The script also highlights and expands upon the biological weapon angle of Project Scoop and uses it to get a few jabs at militaristic aggression-this is where it really feels like a Robert Wise story-but it's still within the boundaries of what Crichton wrote. This is fine, because the idea that something with DNA could mutate into something without it (and then mutate again, somehow, even though it doesn't have any DNA to alter) kind of makes no sense. The suggested origin of the titular organism-that something we sent to space mutated to be able to survive up there-is removed. On the other hand, maybe it would have been a disastrous failure, but still, a failure built on ambition is interesting, whereas the film Wise ultimately made feels anything but.Īs for the script, where the decision to adhere to the novel is really made, the few changes that are made are a mixed bag. This is the only indication that Wise was willing to take any risk whatsoever with the film, and if he had taken this ball and run with it, perhaps it would have been far more successful as a film, far more cherished today than it is.
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Weirdly, though, the thing the movie is most well-known for in film circles is its use of multiple splitscreens three decades before 24 would make them mainstream, a very stylistic device thrown into a film that is otherwise more interested in cinéma vérité realism and Wise's trademark invisible camera. If you completely removed what little music there is and replaced it with something more potent and-dare I say-traditional, the film would feel much more exciting and engaging, rather than dull and dour. The Andromeda Strain almost lacks a score altogether, with even the climactic central core sequence barely punctuated by a sparse and half-hearted attempt to build any emotion whatsoever. It also doesn't help that Wise uses very few film trappings, such as a cinematic score. Crichton's book is suspensful, but not in a way that is easy to translate to film it isn't particularly visual, doesn't have many dramatic plot reveals, is almost entirely based on technical details not easy to explain with snappy dialogue, and isn't terribly interested in character conflict. While it does a good job visualizing the settings and technologies of Crichton's book, one gets the sense Wise was trying to create an atmosphere of tension and intrigue rather than one of scientific discovery and spectacle, and that's where the strict adherence to the source does the most damage to its potential. Instead, it's a slow film framed and shot like a suspenseful spy thriller from the same period. It's just not as great as it could be, and it is nowhere near as excellent or influential as The Day the Earth Stood Still. To be clear, Robert Wise's The Andromeda Strain is not a bad film. This slavish devotion to the source material may please some fans of the novel, but it does a disservice to the film, as the novel isn't particularly cinematic. Despite a handful of very minor changes and omissions-the largest being a simple gender swap of one character-the film and novel are nearly identical in every respect. On the other hand, it is possible to adhere too closely to a source, as can be seen in another Robert Wise adaptation, 1971's The Andromeda Strain, adapted from the Michael Crichton novel of the same name. Fans of that material tend to get annoyed by too many changes, leading to the oft-repeated refrain of "the original was better." There are, however, a few films that diverge very heavily from the source material to create something much greater, such as Robert Wise's 1951 classic The Day the Earth Stood Still, an adaptation so far removed from its source (Harry Bates' short story, " Farewell to the Master"), it is almost unrecognizable. When making a film adaptation, one of the principle things to consider is how closely you want to adhere to the source material.