The Andromeda Strain: The Procedural as Science Fiction

Thu, 21 May 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Most science fiction about a threat from space hands you a monster. The Andromeda Strain hands you a checklist. Robert Wise’s 1971 film is built almost entirely from scientists reading dials, sterilising themselves, arguing over data and waiting for results — and it is one of the most suspenseful genre films of its decade. That is the trick worth studying: it proves that competence, filmed with enough rigour, is more frightening than any creature, because a creature can be shot and a mistake in a protocol cannot.

Westworld (1973): Crichton's Theme-Park Nightmare

Thu, 25 Sep 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Michael Crichton had already sold a bestseller and a screenplay before he stepped behind a camera, and Westworld in 1973 was the novelist teaching himself to direct in public. It shows, in the good ways and the bad. The staging is often flat, the pacing lumpy, the acting broad. And yet the film contains two ideas so durable that half a century of science fiction has been living off them, and a third that pointed straight at the future of the movies themselves. For a first-time director working within a modest budget, that is an extraordinary strike rate, and it is why the film is remembered when slicker pictures of its year are forgotten.

Michael Crichton - vo.rs

The Andromeda Strain: The Procedural as Science Fiction

Westworld (1973): Crichton's Theme-Park Nightmare