@mechajutaro said:

@Knixon said:

I've mentioned this elsewhere before, including on imdb, but it's probably worth noting here too: we're shown a graphic of the blood pH levels in which Andromeda grows; and the reason that the old man and the baby survived, was that their sterno-drinking or constant crying, put their blood pH outside of that range.

But mice and monkeys, such as they showed being used for testing, have blood outside that pH range ALL THE TIME. Which means that Andromed would not have killed them.

I was pretty disappointed that Michael Chrichton, a respected physician and scientist, would make that mistake.

Dude completed medical school, and worked as a doctor for a minute; the bulk of his career was spent as a writer and sometimes filmmaker though. Being disappointed that he made such a mistake is tantamount to being disappointed that Audie Murphy(a decorated war vet, who never had much desire to be an actor, yet ended up in the biz through a fluke)wasn't a thespian of Daniel Day Lewis-esque proportions

But I didn't complete medical school OR work as a doctor, or even a writer or filmmaker, yet I knew that was a mistake. And a pretty basic one for a doctor/scientist. Almost akin to saying or writing that the sun rises in the west.

Put another way, making a mistake like that within one's field of expertise, is harder to overlook than being wrong about some detail of building design or something unfamiliar. Especially since it wouldn't have gone instantly from script to screen, there were probably several layers of production etc where it should have been caught.

I just googled this and the blood ph of both rhesus macaques and rats is in the same range as humans. Poikilotherms such as lizards, frogs and fish do fall outside the human range but they were not tested in the movie. It is a reasonable assumption that they just hadn't gotten around to it yet. They are, after all, looking at how it affects humans and a possible cure.

Why they weren't aware that the baby and the drunk had blood values outside the norm from bloodwork, rather than just guessing about it, is the real writing error. The other writing error is that they knew the organism could consume almost all forms of matter except oxygen and yet still trusted the integrity of their suits and seals. Seems to me that these things being crystals, that ultrasonic radiation would have been an appropriate form of containment.

Maybe the same range, but remember the graph showed Andromeda would grow only in a VERY NARROW range (quoting Dr Stone).

And while the baby's and the old man's blood pH wasn't far enough off from normal human level to raise serious concern just from their tests alone - comparing them to other humans - it did turn out to be too far for Andromeda.

Like Stone said, and I quoted in the first line here, "a VERY narrow range."

It's like saying "normal human temperature is 98.6 f" (which is also being revised, these days) but individuals might vary from say 97.5 to 98.9 (according to one source). So if someone has a normal (for them) temperature of 97.9 it wouldn't raise concerns in tests, but it would keep them from dying if there was an infection that only affected people with temperature from 98.2 to 98.5.

And I wasn't just comparing the normal pH of a "Buffalo" rodent or the monkey to overall human range, I was comparing it to the graph they showed in the movie of the pH range that Andromeda would grow in. The rodent and the monkey, as well as the baby and the old man, were ALL outside of Andromeda's growth range, as shown in the movie. Maybe they weren't VERY different from average human numbers, but they were ENOUGH different for Andromeda to not have killed them.

The graph shown on the screen lacks the granularity to be able to work out what is meant by a very narrow range. Either way, it's just a prop. When Stone and Hall say the organism can only 'live' in a very narrow range, they mean very close to 7.4. Alkalemia is ph above 7.45 and Acidemia is ph below 7.35. Both rats and Rhesus monkeys fall within this range.

You are quite right to point out that an organism that is at least retarded by small shifts in ph isn't especially threatening.

I don't think this presents a plot or writing failing. What's really happening is that an organism that initially appears indestructible turns out to be very fragile. War of the Worlds does something very similar.

Well, I wouldn't put the "War Of The Worlds" concept in quite the same area. Developing an immunity to a certain virus, is one thing, pH is more of a chemical difference.

Okay I looked at the scene again, and paused it, etc. The graph shows no growth for Andromeda at or below pH of 7.39 or above 7.425. It's pretty clear. I could email you a screenshot if you like.

For some reason, this time I couldn't get a google search to come up with normal pH levels for the "buffalo" mouse or the rhesus monkey identified in the movie. But as you note the normal human pH blood levels are 7.35 to 7.45 - not even including alkalamia or acidemia - which already extend beyond the limits of Andromeda growth.

As I say, it's a prop, done from old school animation, I don't see it as a writing flaw anymore than the radar dish spinning backwards. All it's meant to do is represent visually the idea that the organism only propagates within a narrow ph band.

All I'm saying is that the idea that rat and monkey have a blood ph outside of that range, and therefore they should have survived the first exposure, and that this therefore a plothole, is based on two faulty premises:

1. That these animals have an ordinary blood ph significantly different to humans. They do not.
2. That we know with some measure of precision what the parameters for the organism being able to replicate are with regard to ph. All we know is that it will replicate within normal human blood ph levels and that its ability to replicate outside of those values drops off sharply. It is possible that the two human patients are well outside normal parameters. Again, I am discounting what is displayed on computer screens as being 'non script'.

Regardless, the two animals would not have survived on initial exposure anyway because they were within those parameters. The only reference I could find to this idea of rats and rhesus monkeys having significantly different blood ph to humans came from the 'goofs' section of the movie on imdb. The idea seems to have developed a life of its own. My (cursory) google search indicted that both species have blood ph around 7.4. I'm open to correction on that, but even if I am wrong, this seems to be very niche information that probably only people who do scientific and medical work on these animals would know. To suggest that Crichton should have know these values, assuming he is wrong, or that it is common knowledge to ordinary internet users, is I think, setting the bar unusually high for a movie.

No, no, no! That's the exact point I'm making! It DOESN'T replicate within the full range of even NORMAL human blood pH, let alone the extremes. (People with borderline pH in the movie were apparently those who didn't die quickly, and sometimes went rather bonkers.) And the animal blood pH is different ENOUGH from the center-average of human blood pH that even NORMAL blood pH for those animals - while still within the normal RANGE of pH for HUMANS - is NOT within the growth range FOR ANDROMEDA.

And the graph is not done with old school animation, it's a display on a computer screen, specifically marked with pH levels and growth rates. It's very clear. Too bad tmdb doesn't support embedded images.

Also, blood pH for cats is typically 7.24 to 7.40, which means there's a very good chance the old lady's cat in the movie shouldn't have died either. Since the chart shows Andromeda didn't grow with pH at or below 7.39. The cat pH range covers basically .17 (from 7.24 to 7.40, inclusive) of which only .01 on the fringe is within Andromeda's growth range.

I don't know where you are getting the idea that it doesn't replicate in normal human blood.

The 'computer graphics' in the movie were done with animation. They are just displayed on a TV screen. Those displays for the layout of the complex for example were created with...cardboard. Perhaps you are too young to know, but there were no PCs in 1970, and connecting a monitor on a sound stage to a mainframe at a University or large corporation would have been difficult, expensive and likely impossible. You wouldn't be able to re-queue multiple repeat transmissions with each take either.

I didn't even notice the cat. But it's not unreasonable to think a woman who was about to hang herself might also think to kill her cat. She was, after all, going crazy. Plus if you remember, they gassed the town beforehand. The gas, it was said, was not harmful to humans, hence the survival of the baby and the old drunk.

Actually what they said was the gas would ONLY kill the BIRDS. But it's possible they really meant that it just wouldn't kill the people. Although it looked like the cat (lying under the crazy old woman who hanged herself at the stairway and left the weird note) had been dead for some time.

At any rate, the display of the pH results was very clear.

I think it's safe to assume that any gas designed to kill animals capable of spreading a contagion would also apply to rats, squirrels, dogs and cats etc. It would be pointless otherwise.

I don't expect the pilot to list all the animals it would kill, and the reference was only to the buzzards they were observing since that was the immediate concern.

As for the display results being clear, bear in mind you are freeze framing it in HD digital. This would not have been a consideration for the film makers in 1970. To put this in perspective, if you managed a screen grab of the Enterprise bridge in TOS that seemed to show them in the orbit of Pluto, you wouldn't say that's where they actually were if the script and plot said otherwise. More likely you'd accept that the props and set people figured no one would ever look that close, because in 1968, no one would have.

But Andromeda Strain wasn't a TV movie for small screens in 1971. It was a theatrical film, which means people would be able to clearly see the pH display, in the theater, larger than life.

I went back and looked at the graph display. The numbers at the bottom do not align with any data points. And there are no data points outside of what one might assume to be 7.39 on one side and 7.42 on the other. The end data points STILL show a replication growth of 1mg (over no time frame- could be a minute, an hour or a year) so the graph itself does not rule out the organism being able to replicate slowly beyond that range of ph.

The prop does what it is supposed to do, indicate visually to an audience that the organism thrives in the ph range of human blood and becomes less active the further the ph is away from that. The graphic makes it possible to reduce the amount of expository dialogue and technobabble that would be gobbledygook to most audiences. The movie suffers from too much exposition dialogue as it is, and as this is the point in the movie when urgency is developed it's a sensible creative choice.

But it is not a proper or competent, or even useful, graph and was never intended as a reference point to dispute plot points.