I’m not sure at what point during my childhood I got turned on to science fiction films. It might have been just a slight detour from the Japanese monster movies I started watching sometime around kindergarten or the first grade (I’ve already addressed my fascination with the original Ultraman TV series around that same time), but it’s hard to say for sure. At this stage in my life, anything before 1970 is a little blurry for me.
My earliest sci-fi film favorite had to be Fantastic Voyage, released sixty years ago in August of 1966. Directed by Richard Fleischer, with a screenplay by Harry Kleiner, the story is built on a fascinating premise: a crew of three scientists, a Navy captain and a CIA security agent board an experimental submarine that is then reduced to microscopic size and injected into the bloodstream of a critically injured man. Their mission is to remove a blood clot from the patient’s brain from the inside. Success is of utmost importance, because the patient is a Soviet scientist who has defected from Russia with valuable information about the miniaturization process.
The cast is an impressive lineup of actors from the U.S. and UK: Stephen Boyd as Grant, the security officer; Donald Pleasence as Dr. Michaels, the mission’s medical authority; Arthur Kennedy as Dr. Duval, the brain surgeon tasked with destroying the clot with a laser; Raquel Welch as Cora Peterson, Duval’s assistant; and William Redfield as Capt. Bill Owens, designer and pilot of the sub.
The characters make for a capable team, but here’s the catch: They have only an hour to get the job done and get out before the miniaturization effect reverses and they (and their sub) return to normal size. Given the narrow time limit in a sci-fi thriller of this nature, it’s not hard to predict that something—and perhaps many things—will go wrong.
Sure enough, the ship is thrown off course in the early minutes of the mission by excessive turbulence in the bloodstream. Plan B is to re-route through the heart and into the brain, but there are numerous setbacks and delays—at the lungs, in the lymphatic system, and especially in the inner ear, where Cora is narrowly rescued from an attack by antibodies.
Somewhere along the way, Duval’s laser rifle is damaged, presumably by the turbulence early on, although Grant begins to suspect sabotage. Duval is able to repair the rifle, but only by stripping components from the wireless, which forces a communication blackout with the outside world.
It all comes to a head when the crew finally reaches the brain (see what I did there?), but with very little time left to complete the mission before reverting to normal size. Duval exits the sub with Cora and barely manages to clear the blood clot with the laser. Grant joins them to provide assistance, leaving Owens and Michaels in the ship.
Sixty-year-old spoiler alert: Michaels reveals himself as the saboteur when he knocks Owens unconscious and makes a last-ditch attempt to kill the patient by taking control of the sub and aiming it full-speed at the site of the injury.
Outside, Grant fires the laser at the sub, sending it off course. The resulting collision with nearby brain tissue pins Michaels inside the cockpit, and a white blood cell moves into position to attack the threat. Suffice it to say the doctor meets a ghastly fate before the rest of the crew manages a last-minute escape by climbing along the surface of the patient’s eye and escaping to the operating room just seconds before returning to normal size.
Let me stop here for a minute to say that Michaels’ demise scared the crap out of me the first few times I ever saw this movie as a young kid. Maybe it was the raw panic on his face and in his voice as the white blood cell, mindless but deadly, hovered just outside the glass dome of the sub’s cockpit. Maybe it was the horrified screams and the twisted grimace as the thing breached the dome and engulfed his head. Whatever the case, I think I kept watching this movie every time it ran on the local independent TV station—which was fairly often throughout the ‘70s—not only because it was good, but also to desensitize myself to this bit of cinematic horror in the final act.
(I watched the movie once with my wife many years later—sometime in my late thirties or early forties—and I still found the scene vaguely unsettling.)
Fantastic Voyage was a clever and ambitious film for its time, and it still holds up well sixty years later. It’s a science fiction story that also feels like a Cold War thriller. Jan Benes, the injured scientist on the operating table, holds the secret to extending miniaturization past the 60-minute time limit, which is the kind of knowledge that could change the global balance of power and give the free world the upper hand.
Every member of the cast puts in a solid performance, including Raquel Welch, who at the time was still a relative newcomer to Hollywood with minor roles in only three prior movies and a few television appearances. Unfortunately, sexist jokes about her role in Fantastic Voyage persist to this day, but the truth is, as young and inexperienced as she was at the time, she demonstrated commendable acting chops and held her own alongside a cast of seasoned actors.
The film won two Academy Awards, not surprisingly for Best Art Direction and Best Special Effects. Variety echoed the Academy’s choices by proclaiming that the movie’s “lavish production, boasting some brilliant special effects and superior creative efforts, is an entertaining, enlightening excursion through inner space—the body of a man.” The New York Times, meanwhile, called it “the most colorful and imaginative” science fiction film since the independently produced Destination Moon, released in 1950. As recently as 2007, David Kehr of The Chicago Reader called the movie “surprisingly enduring, despite a technical quality crude by contemporary standards.”
The entertainment industry likes to talk about “the big idea,” a catch phrase that refers to the core concept that drives a screenplay, a novel, a television series, or any other form of storytelling. Fantastic Voyage is that rare instance where the big idea is actually very small—even microscopic.
But that diminutive scale is exactly what enables the story to get under your skin quickly. In my case, it has stayed for a long time.