A two-man army reconnaissance team enters the town of Piedmont, New Mexico to recover a military satellite that has crashed nearby. Project members at Vandenberg Air Force base listen in as they describe dead bodies lining the streets, and soon, the transmission ends.

The military summons a Nobel prize winning bacteriologist (Arthur Hill), a professor of pathology (David Wayne) who theorizes that alien life no bigger than a germ could visit Earth, a microbiologist with a pack a day cigarette habit (Kate Reid), and a young, unmarried surgeon (James Olson) to help investigate. Paula Kelly, a frequent co-star in the decade’s Blaxploitation fare, appears here as Olson’s savvy nurse.

The team finds that almost everyone in the town of 68 had their blood coagulated into powder by a virus brought to Earth in the satellite. There are two survivors: an old drunk, and a baby. They’re transported to Wildfire, a government research facility comprised of five levels under the Nevada desert and designed to deal with a contaminant from outer space.

Not only is Wildfire completely sterile, but it’s equipped with a nuclear fail safe. The surgeon has been selected for the team based on the Robertson Odd Man Hypothesis, which states that command decisions involving thermonuclear devices should be carried out by an unmarried male. He’s given the task of canceling the nuclear self destruct should the virus, named Andromeda, try to escape. Wouldn’t ya know it …

Directed by Robert Wise and adapted by Nelson Gidding from Michael Crichton’s debut novel, The Andromeda Strain comes highly regarded as one of the most believable science fiction films ever made.

The movie aims for “science fact” on a number of fronts. Wise, the Academy Award winning director of The Day The Earth Stood Still and The Haunting cast complete unknowns. The Leavitt character was changed from male in the book to female, but she’s played by Kate Reid, who has more in common with a cranky aunt than with Raquel Welch, and is more believable as an eccentric microbiologist than a movie star would have been.

The “monster” is a life form with a crystalline structure, lacking amino acids and so tiny that it takes electron microscopes to see it. This concept was visited later by Star Trek: The Next Generation, but this is the first time I can recall seeing it theorized in a movie. The film also ignores any number of Hollywood clichés on display in movies like Outbreak, including the office romance between the scientists, or the government cover-up.

While this is all a treasure trove for sci-fi geeks, the style here is not for everyone. The first thirty minutes, as we make our way through a town visited by the Grim Reaper, are quite eerie. Wise and editor Stuart Gilmore used split screens here – like the TV series 24 does before it goes to commercial break – to view the carnage from multiple perspectives at once.

Wise would later show with his majestic and tedious Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the pacing here does slow to a crawl as the scientists spend the rest of the movie methodically passing through Wildfire’s bio security measures, exchanging jargon and staring into microscopes until they pass out. No lightsabers here.

As deliberately paced as it is, The Andromeda Strain is exciting and full of questions few sci-fi movies stop to ask. Are we prepared to encounter new forms of life? Why do we think it will land in a spaceship? Will we want to study it, or exterminate it? The story introduces the notion of alien life on earth and quickly shows that things are not going as planned. This was fascinating to me.

Visual effects pioneers Douglas Trumbull and James Shourt created the optical effects, while Albert Whitlock – the most skilled matte painter in Hollywood history – gave several scenes a far bigger and more extravagant look than the budget would have allowed. This is the best movie Michael Crichton ever had anything to do with.