| The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review |
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
| Science-Fiction |
|
|
| Horror |
|
|
| Fantasy |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
FANTASTIC VOYAGE
Rating: 
USA. 1966.
Director – Richard Fleischer, Screenplay – Harry Kleiner, Adaptation – David Duncan, Story – Jay Lewis Bixby & Otto Klement, Producer – Saul David, Photography – Ernest Laszlo, Music – Leonard Rosenman, Photographic Effects – L.B. Abbott, Art Cruickshank & Emil Kosa Jr, Art Direction – Dale Hennesy & Jack Martin Smith, Submarine Design – Harper Goff. Production Company – 20th Century Fox.
Cast:
Stephen Boyd (Charles Grant), Raquel Welch (Cora Peterson), Donald Pleasence (Dr Maxwell Michaels), Arthur Kennedy (Dr Peter Duval), William Redfield (William Owens), Edmond O’Brien (General Carter), Arthur O’Connell (Colonel Reid)
Plot: Scientist Jan Benes defects to the West but an assassination attempt leaves him a coma. Agent Charles Grant is recruited by the top-secret organization Combined Miniaturized Deterrence Forces. He learns that he is to be part of a crew aboard a submarine The Proteus and that the crew and submarine will be reduced to microscopic size and injected into the Benes’s bloodstream in order to operate on the surgically inaccessible clot in his brain using a laser. Injected into the body Grant and the surgical team travel through the bloodstream, marveling at the wonders of the human body seen on a microscopic level. They must reach the brain within 60 minutes or else the effect will wear off and they will return to full-size. However the voyage is undermined by one of the crew who is a saboteur and is prepared to risk everything to stop the mission.
This is one of my all-time favourite sf films. It is really one of the most ingenious pieces of pure conceptual sf poetry that the genre has ever created. One can ridicule its problems and holes, which are manyfold, but it is impossible to argue with the conceptual brilliance of the film, the sheer imaginative spleandour of the idea of conducting a journey by miniaturized submarine through the human body. The script, which comes in part from sf writer Jerome Bixby, knows exactly what a sense of wonder is. And the film creates an amazing view of the human body as a veritable Aladdin’s cave of marvels, more wondrous, colourful and lit up than it could possibly ever be in real life. Even if the superb sets and effects are occasionally beset by grainy mattes lines and the visibility of wires, the imagination of the exercise soars. It’s a pure celebration of science-fiction as conceptual poetry rather than as science. Indeed this is a film that is an object lesson of what sf can do on screen that the written page can never replicate.
Bixby originally envisioned the film as a Jules Verne-ian period piece a la the fad for retro-Victorian sf created by Fantastic Voyage director Richard Fleischer’s own 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954). This is something that would have been fascinating – but it was changed during rewriting and the film updated into the Space Age. Now it echoes with the sense that humanity was on the frontier of taking a quantum leap forward and conquering the whole universe. “Maybe the ancient philosophers were right – man is the center of the universe. Man stands between inner and outer space and there is no limit to either,” says Duval during one of his many such pronouncements. The film is almost a hymn to Space Age technology. Fleischer follows the operation with wonderfully methodical exactitude – the journey through the vast labyrinth by golf cart, the operation being monitored by characters in lab coats on blinking, whirring computers, the submarine slowly being placed on an hexagonal dais, the pickup trolley being wheeled in and the submarine being shrunken in a glass tube and then connected to a syringe. The sense of detail and detached clinicism to the operation is enthralling. Contrast to this to the wave of hand that usually produced marvels of super science in 1950s sf or the heated fervour of madness under which discovery was conducted in 1930s and 40s mad scientist films – there is the sense that the future is here right now.
And once inside the body, the film is dramatically construed as a series of set-pieces involving journeys to a particular part of the body whereupon something goes wrong with regular predictability. It is the things going wrong that makes it dramatically gripping. The scenes navigating through the temporarily stopped heart, the manned venture into the lungs, and especially the seat-edge suspenseful passage through the inner ear as everybody in the operating room has to remain absolutely still and not make a sound lest they cause the inner ear to vibrate are utterly gripping.
Unfortunately in the numerous re-writings the script clearly underwent, not much attention was paid to the characters who are all fairly much written to type – the square-jawed jock hero, the curvaceous token female, the atheistic traitor. Stephen Boyd and Raquel Welch in her first leading part are both wooden, although this is not really a film where one has come expecting penetrating character depth. What is worse is the character of Duval the surgeon has no other characterization than to stand around and delivers ponderous pronouncements about “the miracle of life.” “40 million beats a year,” someone comments in reference to the heart, to which his reply is “All that stands between man and eternity.” It’s a not-very subtle debate – the good side embodies religious awe at the miraculous nature of the human body, while the contrary opinion represents godless atheism and is ultimately revealed as being a Communist traitor (even if Communism is not directly referred to in the film), not to mention is also the perpetual voice of cowardice and defeatism on the mission.
You really cannot deny that there are a lot of logic holes in the film. One can forgive minor quibbles such as the impossibility of squeezing normal-size air molecules into a micro-sized snorkel, or how surface tension would make it very difficult to swim in a tear. But there is one gaping hole that you could drive a full-size submarine through and that is this:– the film establishes that it is necessary that the operation be completed within a 60 minute limit otherwise the crew and submarine will return to full-size. (Interestingly the dramatics of the journey actually take longer than 60 minutes to occur on screen). But at the end of the film the crew return to full-size but somehow leave a submarine and the body of the traitor behind in Benes’s brain after both have been consumed by a white blood cell. Does the film somehow think that being consumed by a white blood cell will fail to cause them to return to full size? Not to mention the fact that at some point between when they complete the operation and swim out, the crew also just discard the laser in the brain. And everybody seems to have forgotten about the fact that a six foot tall cylinder of water was reduced to the size of a syringe and injected into Benes – indeed the amount of water injected into Benes’s body is more than his body mass, which would surely cause him to literally explode when it too returns to size. At least the producers had the good sense to recruit sf writer Isaac Asimov to write the novelization, Fantastic Voyage (1966), which is one of the finest in the usually creatively impoverished arena of all film novelizations, wherein Asimov patches up many of the scientific and plot holes. But for all its logical failings, this is one of the most ingenious pieces of total Hollywood bunkum.
There was a short-lived animated tv series Fantastic Voyage (1968-9). There have been plans in the 1990s to mount a remake as directed by Roland Emmerich of Independence Day (1996) fame, although this has yet to emerge. Joe Dante’s Innerspace (1987) was a spoof.
Richard Fleischer has directed a number of other genre films – Disney’s classic Jules Verne adaptation 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), the musical version of Doctor Dolittle (1967), The Boston Strangler (1968), the psycho-thriller See No Evil/Blind Terror (1971), the over-populated future film Soylent Green (1973), Amityville 3-D (1983), and the Robert E. Howard adaptations Conan the Destroyer (1984) and Red Sonja (1985).
Copyright Richard Scheib 1999
|