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)
Director – Richard Fleischer, Screenplay – Harry Kleiner, Adaptation – David Duncan, Story – Jay Lewis Bixby [Jerome 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.
SYNOPSIS:
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. 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 in the submarine, marvelling 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.
COMMENTARY:
Fantastic Voyage
is one of my all-time favourite science-fiction films. It is one of the
most ingenious pieces of pure conceptual science-fiction 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 splendour of the idea of
conducting a journey by miniaturized submarine through the human body.
The script, which comes in part from science-fiction 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 is a pure celebration of science-fiction as
conceptual poetry rather than as science. Indeed, Fantastic Voyage is an object lesson in what science-fiction can do on screen that the written page can never replicate.
Jerome Bixby originally envisioned the film
as a Jules Verne-ian period piece a la the fad for retro-Victorian
science-fiction 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 centre 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.
Richard 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 this to the wave of hand that
usually produced marvels of super science in 1950s science-fiction 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.
Once inside the body, Fantastic Voyage
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 the
story 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 written to type – the square-jawed jock hero, the
curvaceous token female, the atheistic traitor. Stephen Boyd and Raquel
Welch, in her first leading role, are both wooden, although this is not
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 is a not particularly subtle
debate – the side of good shows 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 cannot deny that there are numerous
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 extremely difficult to
swim inside a tear. However, 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 take longer than
60 minutes to occur on screen). However, 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. Do the filmmakers 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 discard the laser in the brain.
Everybody also 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
far more than his body mass, which would surely cause him to literally
explode when it too returns to normal size. At least, the producers had
the good sense to recruit science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov to write
the novelization Fantastic Voyage
(1966), which is one of the finest in the usually creatively
impoverished arena of film novelizations, wherein Asimov patches up many
of the scientific and plot holes. For all its logical failings, Fantastic Voyage is still 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. James Cameron also expressed interest, although apparently Roland Emmerich rejected his script. 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 true life serial killer film 10 Rillington Place (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).
REVIEW:HERE
IMGAES: MARCUS BROOKS
No comments:
Post a Comment
WE ENCOURAGE YOUR COMMENTS AND OPINIONS ABOUT OUR POSTS. FEEL FREE TO LEAVE A COMMENT.