1966 - FANTASTIC VOYAGE, dated but fascinating science fiction film

Two years before Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey was released, a film that upped the game when it came to showing special effects in the movies, came this bizarre, fascinating and unique film.  It seems that the United States and the Soviet Union (although they are never called that), have developed a process of miniaturization.  They cane shrink a person or even an army down to the size of atoms.  The process only lasts one hour and wouldn't you know it the only scientist who knows how to make the process longer has been the victim of an assassination attempt which has put him in a coma.

The plan is to shrink a group of scientists and insert them into his body, where they will repair the damage and get out before they start to enlarge.  So begins our film.  The story is certainly on the rather ludicrous side but is it any more stupid than the ridiculous Twisters that is currently in the theaters?

20th Century Fox really didn't spare any expensive in the making of this film.   The sets were built on a fairly lavish scale.  The very cool looking shrunken submarine "Proteus" was designed by Harper Goff who had designed the Nautilus for Disney's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

 The film actually has a fairly decent cast of Hollywood mainstays, Stephen Boyd is the secret agent assigned to the mission to make sure there is no sabotage good idea to bring him along.  Raquel Welch in one of her first mainstream films is the medical assistant to Arthur Kennedy playing a surgeon.  Arthur O'Connell  and Edmund O' Brien are the military guys in charge of the mission.  They are basically around to provide exposition and shout out orders.  Also on the team is Donald Pleasence an expert on the human body, watch out for him everyone.

 

Richard Fleischer who was kind of the house director for 20th Century Fox was behind the camera and I would guess this film was a big technical challenge at the time it was made.  Fleischer always seemed to get the difficult films at Fox.  He notably had to straighten out the big scale production of Tora Tora Tora after Kurosawa was fired from that film.  Truth be told the special effects don't really look that great but I guess they get the job done.  Apparently the film did make money.

Fantastic Voyage was written by Harry Kleiner a reliable mainstream screenwriter, the running time is 100 minutes.