Fantastic Voyage

Carry On Up 
The Artery

Fantastic Voyage
Directed by Richard Fleischer
USA 1966
20th Century Fox Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Spoilers swarming in to protect the organism.

It’s been a fair few decades now since I last revisited the film Fantastic Voyage but, I thought I’d give it another look in the Blu Ray era, to see how much better the film would look in this format. Well, it turns out it looks pretty good still, which I would expect from a film as visually rich and well designed as this one.

The film starts off very strongly with a pre-credits sequence which includes a truly great shot of a TWA jet coming in for a landing at night... and also a car crash and minor gun battle. Then there’s a wonderful title sequence where various sound effects relating to the medical machinery around a scientist being kept in a coma, acts as a backdrop to the titles and a graphic of a stop watch countdown. 

The plot to this one is very simple but also almost cyclic when you find out the reason of the mission the main characters have to go on. Basically, actor Stephen Boyd is recruited to join up with a team of scientists and a submarine pilot, played by Donald Pleasence, William Redfield, Arthur Kennedy and Raquel Welch (in her first proper staring role after two years of TV bit parts and two films away from the film which, in the same year, would catapult her to international fame and truly put her on the map, Hammer’s One Million Years BC, partially due to the publivity campaign). The top two big wigs where Boyd shows up are played by Edmond O'Brien and Arthur O'Connell (who I best remember in the Marilyn Monroe movie Bus Stop, although I haven’t seen it in well over thirty years... need to catch up with that one again too, I reckon).

Basically, the scientist who is so important has a blood clot on the brain and the only way it can be operated on is from inside the human body. Luckily, he’s taken to the Combined Miniature Deterrent Forces and it’s here that a submarine, along with its occupants, will be shrunk down to a very small size and injected into the guy’s blood stream, so the crew can make their way into the brain and operate on the clot with a laser gun. Boyd’s special agent is there to help out and also act out as security because, it’s strongly believed that one of the crew is a saboteur who wants to end the scientist’s life. Why? Because the scientist has discovered the way to keep things miniaturised for longer than an hour but he was attacked by foreign foes before he had the opportunity to pass that knowledge on. The script does everything it can to point the finger at Arthur Kennedy, the surgeon, being the traitor but, any film fan will probably twig the true ‘bad guy in medical science clothing’ from the get go.

And so the crew are injected into the man’s bloodstream in a tale including a number of set pieces where things go wrong - they end up going through the heart (while the people monitoring from the outside stop the patient’s heart for no longer than sixty seconds... can the Proteus, their nuclear sub, make it through in time?), a scene where they have to go through the inner ear and somebody outside drops a pair of scissors (sending the crew inside the body flying all over the place) and the memorable moment when Raquel Welch, in her skin tight diving suit, is attacked by antibodies in the immune system and the rest of the crew have to try and pull them off her before she is suffocated to death. 

It’s a great film with some truly interesting and, at the time, cutting edge special effects with some beautiful colours. Even the scenes outside the body look stunning, with Fleischer using lots of vertical and horizontals to split up the compositions (including a big cage of criss crosses which can be artificially opened and closed in front of the camera to push the patterns in the visuals).There’s also a wonderful shot near the start where Boyd is asked to stay in his car and the floor opens up and the car descends to the underground headquarters where the ‘operation’ will be performed. It’s shot in such a way that the perspective of the angle combined with the car going down makes it look like the car is shrinking... which is, of course, a really nice bit of foreshadowing of just what is going to happen to the submarine and its occupants later in the story. 

The score is kinda interesting too... there’s no music at all for almost the first forty minutes of the film (including no score over the credits... apparently the first American film to do that) and when the sub is injected into the blood stream for the final hour (which is more or less shot in real time because that’s when everyone will start to grow to normal size again), the music immediately comes in, courtesy of Leonard Rosenman’s 12 tone serial score, one of the first movies to employ the technique. In fact, the first film to ever use that style was by the same composer for the 1955 psychological film The Cobweb.

The novelisation duty of this one was given to acclaimed science fiction writer Isaac Asimov but he found so many flaws with the science in the movie, that he spent a lot of time rewriting it and getting it all right before he handed it in. Because of some of the difficulties in production (some of which may have been rewrites when Asimov informed the studio), he still managed to get the novelisation into shops before the release of the film. 

And that’s really all I’ve got to say about Fantastic Voyage other than, many people such as James Cameron have tried, and failed, to get a remake going for any length of time... which is a shame because a modern remake would probably be a good idea for this one. As it is, though, the film is deserving of its reputation as a classic and it even inspired a sixties cartoon series sequel, which I used to watch as repeats in the early seventies. A great film and certainly worth upgrading to Blu Ray, for sure.