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The Andromeda Strain (1971), directed by Robert Wise (The Day the Earth Stood Still, West Side Story, The Sound of Music), follows a group of scientists trying to fight a deadly outer-space germ (code-named Andromeda) at a secret underground facility. Although the film showcases snazzy futuristic-looking technology, the story reflects on the dangers of scientific exploration and its dehumanizing effects. This cautionary message about reckless tecnological advances relies on the disturbing emotional power of the film’s aesthetically striking yet cold and inhuman setting.

While science had already created weapons of mass destruction, humanity through the hubris of space exploration has now brought something back that could wipe out life on the entire planet. “Wildfire,” the secret underground facility to which the scientists retreat to escape Andromeda, is a subsurface cylindrical building whose every level is more biologically pure than the one above. As the scientists and patients (a baby and a Sterno drinker who survived contamination) descend to the lowest level, they are cleansed of all contaminants and no longer eat food, but rely on prefabricated supplements. On the bottom floor, there rests a nuclear device made to cleanse the facility in the event of an outbreak. The lower and lower they go, and closer and closer to the nuclear device, the more the patients and scientists are stripped of their humanity in the pure air and without their food.

Echoing and feeding the characters’ feelings of doom and despair, the structure of Wildfire is laced with visual references to Dante’s Inferno. The site itself is made of circular levels, like the Inferno‘s Nine Circles of Hell, and its interior is red, as are the flames of Hell. As the characters enter Wildfire, the door closes behind them with the statement, “No return through this access,” which invokes Dante’s inscription on the Gate to Hell: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”

Ironically, in the end, surgeon Dr. Mark Hall (James Olson) and Nobel Prize-winning professor Dr. Jeremy Stone (Arthur Hill) must fight the “safeguards” in order to avoid detonating the bomb, whose explosion would wind up feeding Andromeda instead of killing it. If that happened, Andromeda would grow into a potentially fatal threat to the whole of humanity. The ominous tone of the film’s setting creates the feeling that these scientists are positioned in the depths of hell, fighting for the ultimate survival of the human race.