Whew! We finally get to a film that isn’t epic-length. With
a modest TRT of 1 hour, 40 minutes, Fantastic
Voyage has a lot of things going for it, and I’d be lying if I were to say
that relative brevity isn’t one of them.
By the mid-sixties, sci-fi movies were getting pretty
serious, characterized by darker themes and tones, denser information, and more
realistic characters. By 1966 we already had Fahrenheit 451 and Seconds, and
before long Planet of the Apes and 2001 (not to mention star Trek on TV). And well, why not? As nightly headlines grew more sobering, and
scientific knowledge advanced ever the more, it made sense that science fiction
reflected those changes. Gone were the days when “Radar Men From Mars” could
satisfy an audience; now they required a dose of reality in their escapism.
And Fantastic Voyage was
no exception. In fact, anyone expecting to find an MST3K-worhy schlock-fest will
be sorely disappointed – Voyage takes
its premise seriously,
not unlike, say, a Michael Crichton novel. Perhaps too serious: there’s not a single second
of levity in this film, not a joke, an anecdote or even a smile. Well, perhaps
I can’t blame them: if I had to face one crisis after another, and had to race
against the clock in doing so, I probably wouldn’t be smiling much either.
The story begins with a man named Grant , a military man
assigned by a secret organization to join a surgical team. Their mission: to
save the life of a scientist, Benes, recently hit with a car by the “other
side,” by removing a life-threading blood clot from his brain. But Grant is
unaware of only one thing – he’ll be performing the surgery with a laser beam,
from inside of a submarine, miniaturized to the size of a molecule. His team
will include a navigator, Capt, Owens; a specialist, Dr. Michaels; the chief
surgeon, Dr. Duval; and his assistant, Cora. Cautious, but realizing Benes
holds the secrets to the miniaturization process and must protected at all
costs, Grant accepts the mission.
But once they get shrunk, trouble begins. Om top of a
sixty-minute time limit, they get bombarded by corpuscles and must detour through
the heart (requiring an induced cardiac arrest), suffer damage to their air
tanks and must replenish their air supply from lung alveoli; go through the
inner ear and go through enormous turbulence when a nurse in the outside world
drops her scissors; and finally must fight off smothering antibodies,
particularly Cora. Even worse, suspicious damage to the laser gun leads Grant
to suspect a sabateur among them. Despite initial skepticism of Duval, it turns
out to be Dr. Michaels, who gets his comeuppance when the sub starts enlarging
and he gets enveloped by white blood cells. The rest of the crew abandons ship,
and escapes via the optic nerve, and out through a tear duct. Having destroyed
the clot with a now-repaired laser, the crew returns to normal size, and enjoys
the success of their mission.
As you can probably infer from the above synopsis, Voyage’s story is quite the potboiler,
but it does keep things humming nicely along. The formula pretty much follows a
“crisis averted/new crisis arises” sequence repeated several times, with a
whodunit and a race against the clock thrown in for added suspense. But what
really elevates this work, and what I’ll always remember about it, is that
smartly utilizes its setting, the human body. It’s not just used as cool window
dressing; it takes each detailed section and employs it as part of the action.
They face-off against corpuscles one minute, while siphoning out air from
oxygenated blood cells the next. The “villain,” aside from he traitor among
them, is a series of realistic threats one could actually encounter when
injected into the bloodstream: antibodies, white blood cells, intensely
magnified sound waves, etc. And all he while, the film celebrates the achievements of the body – through some of Duval’s
dialogue, much of the film plays like a reverie to anatomy. I’ll not soon
forget mediation on the wonder of respiration, where all life is sustained, and
how the simple act of trading carbon dioxide for oxygen takes on great import
when witnessed in epic scope. If the film’s goal was to make me appreciate how
ineffably amazing it is that so much goes on inside of us, every day, then it
succeeded without question.
And something else amazed me too – the amount of visible
human labor that must’ve one on to bring this work to screen. Voyage, made in 1966, is from a period I
like to call the “handcrafted” era of moviemaking, a time before digital
imagery in which all effects, art design, set decoration, costume, makeup –
everything – had to be done right there, with only a few optical effects done
in post. I loved noticing how the
platelets, for example, looked like small balloons behind hurled across the
ship, and I delighted in seeing how he antibodies that attacked Raquel Welch
looked just like plastic, clingy stuff. Sure, it as only narrowly convincing,
but I didn’t care, because the spirit and the labor and the good writing were
there. And all that 60s-era technology, what with he ginormous cathode-ray
monitors and the flashy computers wit illuminated big buttons? Just icing on
the cake.
The script was pretty smart to have Grant as the main
protagonist. Realistically, he has no credentials which would get him a job on
board the Proteus (the script just explains that he’s a good communications
officer). But dramatically, he serves as the audience’s entry point, a
character we can identify with to guide us through this netherword, amid
info-spewing scientists. And like a everyman, he solves some f the ships
problems with his workaround knowledge, like mending the laser with a radio
transistor. And who is first to spot Dr. Michaels as the traitor? That’s right
– the ordinary Joe, who’s got the people-smarts none of the other eggheads
have.
Much was made of Raquel Welch’s presence, and to the film’s
credit, she’s not exploited, at least not very much. No, she doesn’t have a
whole lot of significant dialogue, but she’s credible in her role. And how can
you go wrong with reliable character actor Donald Pleasance, as Dr. Michaels? I
suppose it’s pretty guessable that he’s the real culprit, but I think that’s
only because he plays the turncoat role so well.
All told, a fantastic film, and a classic of its genre. And
it holds up remarkably well.
Rating: ****
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