1966: FANTASTIC VOYAGE

What’s it about?

When an assassination attempt sends a Russian defector with important defense secrets into a coma, the American government decides to shrink a team of surgeons down to microbial size so they can repair the damage from the inside. The plan calls for injecting a submarine carrying five-person team (including Donald Pleasance and Raquel Welch) into the carotid artery for a relatively short jaunt to the affected area of the brain.

Things, however, immediately go wrong when the submarine is swept down a whirlpool of blood into the venous system and starts heading towards the heart. Still hoping to complete their mission, the team must now traverse the perils of the heart, the lungs, the lymphatic system, and the inner ear before arriving at the brain. And the probable presence of a saboteur on board only adds to the danger.




Is it any good?

There’s a part of me that wants to hail FANTASTIC VOYAGE as something like a culmination of the ambitions of sci-fi movies from the previous two decades. I don’t think the case for that kind of claim is foolproof -- there’s another part of me, after all, that recognizes it is a movie with a lot of flaws. But even though FANTASTIC VOYAGE is perhaps not exactly pioneering, it does feel to me like a big incremental step forward for the genre.

It would be nice if I could point to some particular element as the obvious keystone to what I’m talking about, but I don’t think there really is one. Instead, I think the difference with FANTASTIC VOYAGE is really more about the shortcomings of the movies that came before it. Take DESTINATION MOON (1950), for instance. That movie stood out at the time because it combined a dramatic speculative vision with the budget needed to achieve it and a willingness to take the material seriously. But the science and special effects upstaged the plot and characters, and the story itself is just never satisfying. THE SILENT STAR (1960), by contrast, had the vision and spectacle, the willingness to treat sci-fi seriously, and a pretty good story -- but it lacked the budget and talent to really bring them to life. Again and again, most sci-fi movies from the 1950s and 1960s seem to fall short in one category or another. ON THE BEACH (1959) lacks a clear or compelling vision, THIS ISLAND EARTH (1955) and VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA (1961) don’t take their science or their audiences seriously, and a whole host of movies fall prey to low budgets, short production times, or inexperienced cast and crew.




One part of my argument is that FANTASTIC VOYAGE succeeds (more or less) on every meaningful metric that I would use to rate a sci-fi movie. It has an compelling speculative vision that is really pretty unique. It has the budget to convincingly create a weird and alien world full of imaginative spectacle. It has an exciting story and a talented cast that makes it believable enough. And it has a real interest in science, a respect for accuracy, and a curiosity about what might exist beyond the bounds of the knowable world.

If I took half an hour to think about it, I could probably come up with a short list of six or seven sci-fi movies from 1966 and earlier that arguably meet all of those criteria just as well as FANTASTIC VOYAGE does. But I think the difference with FANTASTIC VOYAGE is that it succeeds while swinging for the fences -- it envisions a story on an epic scale, and mostly delivers what it promises without losing sight of the elements that make a good movie. This isn’t a black and white B-movie set mostly in an ordinary American town with a slow-building sci-fi premise. It’s an all out full color adventure that takes place largely in a world that none of us will ever see except on TV and movie screens. In saying this, I mean no disrespect to those quieter, less flashy movies like THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN (1957) or I MARRIED A MONSTER FROM OUTER SPACE (1958). The fact they are a less ambitious doesn’t make them any less enjoyable -- just less likely to create as big of a splash.




I also don’t want anybody to get the idea that I think FANTASTIC VOYAGE is a perfect movie. It’s got its share of flaws as well. The weakest link is probably the story, which exists entirely as a mechanism for first getting the surgical team from one bodily attraction to another. Even accepting that surgery via miniaturized submarine is the best option for this particular patient, there’s no reason that the operation in question should take the team through the heart, the lungs, and most of the other stops they make. So the story is mostly just a string of accidents that each justify the next stop on the journey. Yet, it’s all believable enough and certainly makes for a more exciting trip than there might otherwise have been.

I don’t want to spend too much time picking nits though. The acting is good, the submarine is neat, and the special effects are pretty effective. I had thought that at least some of the special effects were the result of miniature photography of real cells. But that’s not the case -- every special effect (from red blood cells to the chambers of the heart to alveoli to antibodies) are recreated at a giant size so they can be photographed with the models and actors. The fantastic voyage does eventually start to feel a bit like “the greatest hits of health class”, but even so there’s something undeniably interesting about a (seemingly fairly accurate) journey through the human body. And as far as cinematic images go, the sight of Donald Pleasance being eaten by a white corpuscle is one that sticks with you for decades.



What else happened this year?

-- John Frankenheimer directed SECONDS, in which an old man is given a chance for rejuvenation in the body of a relatively young (but still incredibly square) Rock Hudson. But when it turns out that he has just as little control over his new life as his old one, he starts trying to break out.
-- Francois Truffaut’s directed a surprisingly good adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s FAHRENHEIT 451. The movie improves a bit on the novel as far as pacing and character interest goes, but it’s probably still all too allegorical for its own good. Julie Christie co-stars in Truffaut’s only English-language movie.
-- A man gets an experimental lifelike mask to cover up his disfigured face in THE FACE OF ANOTHER. But when he uses his new identity to anonymously seduce his own wife, the experiment starts to go awry.

If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1966...

I was all ready to recommend FAHRENHEIT 451, but I think after writing this entry I talked myself into going with FANTASTIC VOYAGE as the best movie of the year. As I said earlier, it’s a big incremental jump for the genre -- and it seems like an important stepping stone on the way to some of the true classics that arrived a couple years later.