With our world’s current battle with COVID-19 on everyone’s mind, a lot of folks are looking back on similar storylines that occurred in works of fiction. I know there are a lot of examples but I will discuss “The Andromeda Strain” (1971), a big-budgeted science fiction film from the Seventies based upon the novel by Michael Crichton. It explored an alien virus piggybacking on a speck of meteor that ends up embedded in a space-borne satellite. The satellite crashes down near a small desert town. The natives naturally are curious about the object and examine it but not before getting exposure to the out of this world life form. The results are disastrous and deadly. After the entire town is found to be dead, a secret government biological research division goes into action and isolates the organism in a vast, underground laboratory complex. It is now up to the “experts” to prevent the bacterial strain from mutating and spreading across the globe. There are some interesting futuristic (at the time) devices and special effects used in this movie. It still holds its charm for me and is very suspenseful in spots but can be a little tedious at times as the four main protagonists go about their tests and experiments to scientifically make sense of this unknown, threatening quantity and try to find a means to eliminate it.
We don’t know how long our present pandemic will last or if the worst of it is behind us but we can certainly agree that it would be best if life did not imitate art after seeing any of the nightmare scenarios detailed in these pandemic themed works of art.
