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. 

Doctor Who: Into The Dalek

Soldier Who

Doctor Who: Into The Dalek
UK Airdate: 30th August 2014
BBC 2

Okay, so after last week’s episode, reviewed here, I have to admit to being a little less than enthusiastic about watching the next episode in the show. Especially considering it stars The Doctor’s oldest and much loved foes The Daleks. You know, Tom Baker only went up against the Daleks twice and he was the longest running Doctor, to date, both in terms of years, number of episodes and screen time. Nowadays, the Daleks (not to mention the Cybermen, Silurians and Sontarans) are way over used as villains in the show. When someone like Tom Baker went up against the Daleks you knew it was a special event. Nowadays they’re everywhere. So that’s two reasons why I wasn’t really looking forward to tonight’s episode.

But you know what? I’m happy to report that tonights episode was a real corker. Not only did it give us something we hadn’t quite seen before but it also gave us a proper look at the way Capaldi’s version of The Doctor interacts with Clara without having all the usual regeneration angst getting in the way like it did last time.

Now, to be fair, the plot of this one was a little... well, it was a bit old hat. We basically had the lone, good Dalek concept which first raised it’s head in the first ever of Christopher Ecclestone’s encounters with the creatures when the show was initially rebooted (but in reality just re-continued) back at the dawn of the Russel T. Davies era of the show. This was then cross pollinated with a revisiting of the concept of the movie Fantastic Voyage (which was later novelised by renowned science fiction writer Isaac Asimov). The concept, where people are miniaturised down to enter the body of a person, in this case a Dalek, to make repairs from the inside of the host body is a popular one and this certainly isn’t the first Doctor Who story to revisit this concept. However, because it’s been used as a concept and fused with the aforementioned exploration of Dalek morality, asking some interesting questions and then making the answers to those questions relevant to the soul of The Doctor, the episode had a certain buzz about it that I really wasn’t expecting based on last weeks opening episode and, frankly, the last few years of the show.

The more interesting stuff was The Doctor’s new relationship with Clara which has turned from the flirting, flaunting of a younger looking Doctor trying to impress his travelling companion into a matured relationship where affectionate barbs are traded, Clara shows herself to catch onto things quicker than The Doctor and, in one nice moment, where Clara gives The Doctor a hefty slap around the chops. There are touches of River Song in her dialogue now because, presumably, since she’s met every incarnation of The Doctor in his past, her tone has changed to one of someone who knows the inner workings of somebody very well. So that was pretty entertaining stuff.

Equally entertaining is the introduction of someone who looks to be a new regular on the show, a soldier by the name of Mr. Pink, who is possibly the new love interest for Clara although, I don’t think this set up is really heading towards that, in all honesty. At least I hope it isn’t because, pleasant as that might be, it also seems a bit plain and simple for a show like Doctor Who and so I hope this is part of the beginning of a strange new twist to come. I hope I wasn’t the only one to notice that both Clara and said Mr. Pink are both teachers at Coal Hill School. I don’t think this is the first time it’s been mentioned that this is where Clara works now but the significance of that particular school, for those who didn’t catch it, is that it’s the school where Susan, The Doctor’s grand-daughter in the first ever episode of the show, was a student. It’s also the work place of his other two companions from that first series of the Hartnell years, Barbara Wright and Ian Chesterton. So this is all very interesting but I doubt if that particular one is going to be a sleeper plot element anytime soon. But again, we’ll see what happens.

Now, there were some bad things about this one in terms of continuity, I thought. It really doesn’t take a group of Daleks that long to wipe out a group of humans on a spaceship, for starters. Nor is it all that credible that a single, lone Dalek can take out eight or nine of its colleagues without being taken out itself. And as for the Dalek antibodies in the episode, another nod to the movie Fantastic Voyage, well the logic of the way they behaved didn’t really make a lot of sense in some scenes. It’s like they behaved in one fashion when it suited the script and then in a completely different way when it was needed that they should. Now I may have been distracted and am missing something there but... that was my initial impression of it but, really, these criticisms are only minor quibbles in what was an otherwise brilliant episode.

And we still have the more obvious set up scene, continuing on from last week, where the mysterious Missy is collecting the souls, bodies, after images or whatever of the people who find themselves dying around The Doctor. Now there has been some speculation that Missy is a female incarnation of The Master. Maybe, I’m not so sure, to be honest. I’m still wondering if we’re seeing the beginnings now of the woman who we came to know in later life in the Matt Smith era of the show as “the eyepatch lady”. So we’ll have to see what happens there... kind of too early to tell right now. I don’t think she’s going to turn out to be a version of River, after she was saved in The Library Of The Dead but, then again, who knows?

What I do know is that it was a brilliant episode, Capaldi has really found his feet very fast, Clara has great chemistry with him and the music on this one was pretty cool too. So that’s really good news as far as I’m concerned on this one because, frankly, I was kinda expecting really bad things from this series. But... quite the opposite. I’ve not been looking forward to next weeks episode, Robots Of Sherwood, with any amount of enthusiasm but maybe now I am willing to approach it with a little more of an upbeat twinkle in my eye. We shall see what we shall see. Until next time...