Hollywood Utopia

166 Hollywood Utopia
effectiveness of official government policy. As in Body Snatchers, individualised
human agency remains impotent in the face of corporate/government power.
The Andromeda Strain
Whereas Endangered Species focuses on government conspiracies, The
Andromeda Strain (1970) seeks to expose more universal fault lines within western
technology, while connecting most explicitly back to 1950s B-movies and their
preoccupation with all-pervasive viruses. Following the mantra inviting ecology
activists to ‘think globally but act locally’, The Andromeda Strain connects many
important arguments regarding the potential role of technology within a future
eco-system.
Conventionally, the primary paranoia of the text is the discovery of the connection
between the ‘micro-thing’ from outer space and a secret bacteriological warfare
project (also suggested in Endangered Species via an overweening and secretive
intelligence agency), together with the pervasive dangers of global scientific
research. The American defence forces are attempting to harness the powers of the
‘ultimate weapon’, namely alien life forces.
Directed by Robert Wise 27 who began his career as an editor on Citizen Kane, the
film is based on a novel and screenplay by the prolific and often ecologically
provocative author Michael Crichton, who went on to write Jurassic Park. The
narrative begins with an aerial view of a small remote village in New Mexico with
everyone appearing dead from a mysterious ‘virus’ 28 except for a drunken old man
and a crying baby. As a scientific and military team becomes metaphorically and
physically cleansed in preparation for an investigation of the virus within a secret
underground research laboratory, the audience is treated to a technical display of
scientific instrumentation and an evocative use of colour and architectural space
within a carefully structured mise-en-scène, comparable to the clinical delights of
Kubrick’s 2001. As the team examine the survivors from within their protective
life-suits, and survey the alien life force from behind glass screens and banks of
monitors, audiences are forced to confront the unseen ‘horror’. All the
sophisticated technology mediating the alien’s otherness does not provide a
language to decode its awesome strangeness. All the investigators are left with are
humorous platitudes like ‘it’s getting bigger’, as they attempt to ‘test’ the
molecules with their (un)sophisticated instrumentation.
Unlike life on this planet, which is implicitly understood and apparently fully
appreciated, alien life does not conform to (eco)logical patterns, particularly by
leaving no waste of any type and surviving within apparently non-nurturing
conditions. Like the Borg in Star Trek, its indescribable life force cannot be
destroyed by ‘conventional force’ - a fact which greatly upsets the logical, ordered,