Fantastic Voyage

I have recently seen parts of Fantastic Voyage, and it struck me just how backward the technology looks today. For example, Proteus Navigation systems consists of rolled up charts, and its communication system is a wireless Morse code key. They may as well be aboard Titanic. As for the purpose of the mission, that is to remove a potentially fatal blood clot from the brain of a defecting scientist, they do much the same things these days with catheters and arthroscopic surgery. The sub seemed to be over crewed as well. I suppose someone had to roll and unroll all those navigation charts. Of course even the best views of the future often collide with the actual future. Think of William Shatner with a cell phone.

I bought the movie on BluRay last week and watched it and immediately realized it wasn't what I remembered when I first saw it in the movie theater in 1967. Maybe I was more impressionable back then when I was younger. The production values were so corny that they created a bias that hung through the rest of the movie. From the beginning when the car carrying Stephen Boyd arrives at the secret underground facility, then rides down the elevator and comes out in what looks like a spruced up underground parking garage. Boyd is then picked up by someone driving a golf cart and proceeds to drive back up several levels where more golf carts are seen scooting along with a soldier directing traffic. Then we see the two macho Generals, played by Edmund O'Brien and Arthur O'Connell, chomping on cigars. But the funniest part was that amongst all the high tech equipment was a simply electric hot plate and a percolator coffee pot that got repeated use and they had it sitting right on top of the TV monitors. It wasn't until the crew got into the submarine that the movie became worth watching and Raquel Welch is always a welcome sight. But wait, here is a high tech vehicle and only one person in the crew has been trained to operate it. Yeah, they have an air leak so the pilot tells two of the crew who have never been on the sub before to go over and shut off the valves, you know, they're over on the wall. Go find them. Now how is that for a script. And if they remake the movie I do hope they give those two Generals a better uniform. In place of the ribbons on their jacket was a very large patch with the letters CMDF - Combined Miniature Defense Force. Hey, just a suggestion, Raquel Welch may be the only star of the movie still alive today but if you remake it she still looks good enough to be in it.

source: Fantastic Voyage

All I can remember, from what the Doctors Told me, These people, where miniaturised, in a Submarine, and injected into my cardioid artery. The first part of the voyage was incident free, until they met with a strong current, and set them off course. They had to go through my heart that the surgeons stopped, this was already slowed down as was my respiration to 6 breathes per minute,After they went through my heart, they revived it (Only just) and proceeded to one of my lungs. There they had to stop, as they ran out of air. You will never guess how they replenished their air supply, they tapped into my left lung and when i inhaled their air supply was filled up. Then they went into my ear and the surgeons had to be quiet!! and after that they finally went into my injured part of my brain. There they used a laser to repair my damage. after that 5 of the team swam towards my optic nerve and the surgeons scooped them out of my tear duct of my left eye. when I came to, the Doctors told me that these brave teams saved my life, and do you know what, I actually believed them. In this review I was reviewing this film , by pretending I was Banes, the shot man. This film is excellent if you want to find out about your body. I enjoy all the special effects, If I was in the team, I'd rather be upstairs, then inside Banes body. I would like to work with the Cornel and be on the computers. I also thought that the Proteuous was beautifully designed and looked correct. The effect of the blood corpuscles can be done with looking at a larva lamp, the blobs are similar.This film is available on DVD, but has to be ordered from Zavvi, formerly virgin record shops and costs £13. they can get it for you in 24 hours and can be delivered to your house for free, or to the shop. I for one, is going to try and get it. I thought that the man who played banes, had an easy part to play in this film. All He had to do, was just lie still and sleep all the way through the film. I recognised Donald Plesence and Racca welsh. So Ends this review I'm going to give this film 10/10.

The film begins with a statement, in which the film makers thank all the experts without whom this movie wouldn't have been possible. When the first signs of bad acting, bad dialogue and bad special effects present itself (which is pretty much right after the end of the intro credits), I started to condemn the experts for helping with this film. After the journey finally began, however, I was quite sure there actually have never been any experts involved in the making of this film. And if there were, I hope they lost their jobs and were burnt at the stake of science. How can shrinked people breeze oxygen molecules not much smaller than themselves? How can elite doctors say things like "in comparison to our size the air pressure inside is tremendous"? How can the dropping of scissors cause an in-ear earthquake lasting more than 30 seconds? Why are all characters luminescent when swimming around in what should have been pitch black in the first place? I could go on for hours. The screenplay is equally terrible. Why don't they just abort the mission and start all over, instead of constantly risking their lifes and the life of the patient needlessly? Why does every character have to be that stereotypical and bleak? Who on earth thinks, that jokes like "This is a bad time to have no sugar" (spoken by someone who drinks his coffee with sugar) are even remotely funny? How could they have possibly forgotten that the boat (or what's left of it) will deshrink inside the patient's body, thus killing him and making the mission a failure? I never thought I'd be saying this, but if you're interested in the "voyage into the unknown fantastic" kind of movie, avoid this one and watch "Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959)" or "The Core" instead, because beside the fact that they're also basically flawed, they're a lot less painful to watch (well, maybe just a little less in the case of the former one).

To enjoy this movie one must turn off their brain as soon as the theme tune of 20th Century Fox starts . The whole set up is very hard to swallow - A scientist who know the secret of miniaturization is injured by commie assassins and now lies in a coma due to a blood clot on the brain and only by miniaturizing a submarine type capsule and sending both it and its crew through an artery can both the scientist and free world be saved . It's never actually explained as to why miniaturizing is such a radical development for espionage or warfare . Think about it does this mean you can infiltrate the Kremlin by sending an envelope containing a miniaturized army ? Seeing as the enemy are aware of the process they can easily protect themselves against this - By running a rolling pin over all incoming mail . And wouldn't shrinking someone to the size of something little bigger than an element kill them anyway due to the changes in mass ? Wouldn't air pressure alone kill any miniaturized person ? And wouldn't it have been a good idea to vet the crew to find out if any of them were claustrophobic before sending them on their mission ? You understand what I'm saying don't you ? The ideas and plot devices presented are entirely laughable because of their nature , that's why I told you to stop thinking about it . If you manage this you've got a pretty enjoyable escapist fantasy once it gets started . You realise that if the capsule crew go on an uneventful journey we wouldn't have much of a movie so we find obstacles at every corner involving detours , anti-bodies and a traitor within and if none of this gets you excited how about Raquel Welch in a really tight costume ? What do you mean she hasn't been given any decent lines ?

Back in 1966, long, long before the world was turned upside down and inside out on Sept. 11, the world was a very different place. The movies were quite different and science fiction pictures depended more on good writing and less on special effects. Partly because the phrase "computer generated" was years away. In 1966, 20th Century Fox released a very clever, well-written and innovative movie called, "Fantastic Voyage". The on-screen foreword informed the viewers that they were going to be taken to a place that no one had been before, and see things that had been, until that point in time, never been seen by human beings. I'm sure that this film had its fair share of technical advisors putting in a lot more than their 2 cents worth to make sure that the film accurately depicted human anatomy. The plot... A scientist, Jan Benes, has defected from behind the Iron Curtain, has, with the help of Grant, one of our top CIA operatives. Benes has decided to give his expertise with Miniaturization to the US. The "other side" has no choice but to try to kill him before he can breathe a word of it. The assassination attempt is made, but Benes barely survives, falling into a coma. After the movie's credits finish rolling, Grant is brought to a secret, gov't location. There, he meets Gen. Carter, who is in charge of the CMDF - Combined Miniature Deterent Forces. They can shrink anything; cars, planes, tanks, people way down in size, thus enabling them to become unseen military weapons. The problem: both sides have this capability. Another problem is... there is a time limit. They can only stay miniaturized for 60 minutes. After that the object or person automatically starts to grow. Benes had the answer to this problem, but he will need special medical treatment to regain consciousness. That's where Grant and a special team of doctors, technicians and such will have to go into action. After Grant meets the rest of the team, the surgeons in charge, Dr. Duvall and Dr. Michaels go over their plan to remove the blood clot in Benes' brain. They will board a special Navy submarine, called The Proteus, be miniaturized and injected into Benes' body by hypodermic needle. Naturally, the crew runs into Murphy's Law and a job that was expected to take 10 to 15 minutes takes much, much longer. The ending in the movie differs quite a bit from the book written by Isaac Azimov (I know because I read it... twice), and there are a number sub-plot twists that made me shake my head, but seeing Ms. Welch in that wet suit made it more than worth while. I consider this movie to be one of my very favorite sci-fi/fantasy flicks from the '60s. If you haven't seen it yet, for whatever reason, I can suggest you spend the 100 minutes with some very fine actors, some of whom are no longer with us, such as Stephen Boyd (Grant), Edmund O'Brien (Gen. Carter) and Arthur O'Connell who was in charge of the medical team, and others like Arthur Kennedy (Dr. Duvall), Donald Pleasence (Dr. Michaels) and last but not least, the ever-beautiful, Raquel Welch as Cora Peterson, Dr. Duval's technical assistant. One last thought.... if this movie was remade with present-day technology, i.e. computer generated imaging and the like, there's no telling how it would dazzle the viewers' eye.

This film was originally introduced to me at about 8 or 9 years of age on a Saturday afternoon and it quickly became a favorite of mine. This film tells the story of a brilliant scientist who is injured on his way to offer the U.S. military some much needed info for miniaturizing people and objects and allowing them to stay in the miniature state beyond the now 60 minute time limit the military is faced with. With a top-notch cast that includes; Stephen Boyd, Edmond O'Brien, Donald Pleasence and Raquel Welch as the medical Dr.'s and scientists that are miniaturized and injected into the scientists body in an effort to repair a wound that can't be fixed through the usual means. The effects in this film are truly amazing and make for a lot of fun as the sub/crew journey through the body and face problems along the way, especially as they are attacked as foreign bodies by the scientist's own natural defense system. If you haven't had the pleasure of seeing this little gem, by all means find it and rent it and if it's been a while, why not revisit this film, I'm amazed at how well it stands up, even after almost 40 years since it's release.

This movie holds up after nearly 35 years. The TV version is often chopped up for commercials and the print muddy, but if you can get a good video or see it on a premium movie channel, Fantastic Voyage will still produce a sense of wonder as you navigate "inside" an injured man's body with a team of intrepid explorers to find and repair microscopic damage. Some of the Cold War aspects of the film might jar, as well as a 35-year-old vision of "high tech", but the spec effects of the journey of the PROTEUS through the human vascular system was years ahead of its time.

"Fantastic Voyage" follows a surgical team of three scientists: Dr Peter Duval, the top brain surgeon in the country (Arthur Kennedy); Cora Peterson, his technical assistant (Raquel Welch); Dr Michaels, chief of the medical mission (Donald Pleasance), plus the skipper of the ship (William Redfield) and Grant (Stephen Boyd) the security agent for security purposes... The sealed vessel—The Proteus—is reduced down by a secret branch called CMDF (Combined Miniature Deterrent Forces) and injected into one artery of a defecting Russian scientist who has suffered brain injury and he's in a coma from an assassination attempt... The crew must navigate to the scientist's brain (within exactly 60 minutes) where Dr Duval will attempt to dissolve the coagulum with a laser beam… After that everything starts growing back to its original size "Fantastic Voyage" is a film of authentic wonder: An ocean of life, the corpuscles, the heart, the lungs of the human body through which the crew move are exquisitely designed in great detail with artistic quality... The plot creates unceasing moments of suspense as the ship and its crew are continually threatened by the scientist's natural defenses: white corpuscles, reticular fibers, antibodies and other factors… Leonard Rosenman's futuristic score nicely complements the adventure on screen with the strange sound of the human blood rushing through arteries, veins, rhythmical muscular movements, and of course, the sabotage occurred on board With two Oscar Awards for Best Visual Effects and Best Art Direction, 'Fatastic Voyage' is certainly the most unusual journey into the human body, where the 'medieval philosophers were right. Man is the center of the universe. We stand in the middle of infinity, between outer and inner space. And there's no limit to either.'