Author Michael Crichton made a career of fabricating yarns about scientific pursuits which are intended for the advancement and betterment of Man going horribly awry. Whether it be an unfailing belief in the infallibility of scientific advancement being a good thing and absolutely essential to our well being or just a catastrophic domino effect of good intentions and can’t fail scientific method crumbling into chaos, Crichton offered up a bevy of such cautionary tales about our experts overstepping their bounds with regard to natural order and development.
Case in point: The Terminal Man. This cinematic take explores what would happen if a psychologically damaged individual was administered a surgical procedure to curb his appalling tendency to succumb to seizure induced bouts of homicidal rage. Well, let us say, that it only makes things worse. Chalk up another big victory for science as it certainly meant well.
Great George Segal movie. He wildly swings from playing the weak, helpless subject of his laboratory masters to becoming a raging, menacing maniac. A modern day Frankenstein monster. Nightmarish.
May Segal rest in peace.
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.
A varied collection of unusual movie and music video clips.
