The Incredible Shrinking Man

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The Incredible Shrinking Man

What a fantastic film this is: Richard Matheson's finest feature-length script is like the best of his Twilight Zone episodes, both wonderfully imaginative and thoughtfully philosophical at once. It begins in bland, generic, white picket fenced 1950s America and ends in deep contemplation of the infinite, and along the way becomes unmoored from all reference points from the age in which it was made, as the protagonist himself has every thing familiar to him progressively stripped away and he is reduced to the most raw, primal, archetypal battle for survival. The actor Grant Williams never did anything of any real note again, but here, in his continually deepening suffering, he moves into a glowing, timeless space that would not look out of place in any Bergman film. It's a performance for the ages. The Incredible Shrinking Man is a rare, unique work and by far my favourite of all those 1950s sci-fi and monster movies.

This has always been one of my favorite science fiction/horror movies from the 1950s. This is an existential science fiction movie. Man alone against the universe is always a powerful topic, and writer Richard Matheson, who adapted his own novel for the screen, does an admirable job. Grant Williams' character isn't fighting aliens or demons, but rather the extraordinary circumstance of his mysterious shrinking, and the unforeseen consequences of his ever-dwindling size. I love the fight with the spider, but my favorite part of the movie is the final monologue. It adds another half a star to an already extraordinary film.

The plot is simple: after being exposed to a mysterious, possibly radioactive mist, a man finds he is slowly but inexorably diminishing in size… His pride, job, marriage and, finally, his very life are threatened as his relation to the world about him changes daily… A cellar floor becomes a stark desert where giant insects hunt prey and the only food consists of rock-like crumbs of stale cheese left in mousetraps Arnold's expert use of huge sets and props provides excitement, but it is the philosophical script that supplies its rare power: complacent modern man, forced back on his primitive wits simply to survive, finally discovers hope, peace and meaning in the realization that everything in the cosmos, however small or insignificant, has its own place and worth

This is the tale of the very cruel joke played upon a young man by Fate. Against horrifying odds he triumphs and retains his dignity. In so doing, this film is raised from being a merely superior monster movie to one of strangely spiritual significance. The special effects are still pleasing and the tarantula remains one of Cinema's truly terrifying embodiments of mindless evil. This was to be Grant William's finest film. He died in 1985 at the age of only 54.

Instead of the typical blood and gore screaming sensationalism of many 1950s sci-fi films, this is an amazingly well thought-out film that is underplayed and even philosophical. There are some amusing moments in the film, such as when we discover Scott in a dollhouse, but much of the story is handled seriously -- the topics of being different, surviving in an unsympathetic world, crass commercialism, and loneliness are well portrayed. The theme of the film is what is really amazing. Despite the rather schlocky title, we are given a view of humanity's place in the universe. The final sequence is an imaginative portrait of the balance between the macrocosm and the microcosm. The film is more than it first appears. Definitely see this one.