🇵🇱 Steve G 🇵🇸’s review published on Letterboxd:
There are very few films in the science fiction genre that are just pure science fiction. If you ever flick through lists of the very best films in the genre (or even the very worst), you will normally see them described additionally as thrillers or horror films or action films.
The Andromeda Strain, though, is about as close to just pure science fiction as you are going to get, save for the frantic last 15 minutes which are arguably the weakest part of the film. The story revolves around a special team of scientists and experts that are brought together in a secret location by the government in an attempt to discover what has wiped out almost the whole population of a small desert town where an old satellite has fallen.
It may be slow moving and jargon heavy, but it successfully treads the very difficult to locate line between insulting the audience's intelligence and being completely impenetrable and never really threatens to fall either side of the line. That is as much down to the splendid direction of Robert Wise as it is to the Michael Crichton story, but there's no doubt that a practically no name cast plays a huge part in this.
From what I can gather, it's quite difficult to get hold of a really good quality DVD copy these days, which is a nonsense really. Films of this quality and importance should be treated like the treasures they are.