Nor does there really need to be, as this is clearly designed as mass entertainment and not the kind that makes you think. In spite of that, there isn't a shred of credibility to the story. The film opens with a text screen pitching this plot as realistic, what with astronauts soon to go to the moon and all. All the while, cigar-puffing agents observe tensely, making use of primitive screens, vulgar radar tracking, and an analog sign counting down the sixty minutes the crew has to complete the job before deminiaturization occurs and returns them all to their regular dimensions.įantastic Voyage is loaded with hooey science. That sets the tone for what is to come, as the sub encounters unforeseen obstacles and changes course accordingly. The ride quickly becomes bumpy and when the crew's path requires them to pass the heart, the human-sized scientists and officials looking on make the decision to stop Benes' heart for a minute to avoid turbulence. It unfolds as an effects-driven spectacle with a swirl of colorful liquid bodies floating past the tiny vessel's ample windows. The crew agrees to be shrunk down to the size of a microbe, injected into Benes, and make the perilous journey up to his brain.Īfter forty minutes of set-up including a somewhat laborious look at the shrinking process, the voyage begins. Peter Duval (Arthur Kennedy), and Duval's trusted longtime assistant Cora Peterson (Raquel Welch). Michaels (Donald Pleasence), poetic surgeon Dr. Government agent Charles Grant (Stephen Boyd) and pilot Bill Owens (William Redfield) join the operation's scientific minds, circulatory specialist/navigator Dr. His life in danger and, with it, his secret knowledge, government agencies schedule an unusual mission.Ī team of five is hastily assembled and assigned to pilot the submarine Proteus through Benes' body to reach the damaged part of his brain and dissolve the blood clot.

That's bad news for the United States, because the comatose individual is scientist Jan Benes (Jean Del Val), the only one with knowledge of how to miniaturize objects for longer than an hour. Unknown enemies still plot an attack, putting the man in a coma.

The film opens, quite coyly, with an important old man being protected in a motorcade. The 1966 film Fantastic Voyage came up with a way around that, by setting its submarine journey inside the body of a human being.

Their thrills, involving the extraordinary and Earth-threatening, would be difficult to recreate without obvious imitation. The vessel had also been successfully mined for science fiction in hit movies like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. The submarine was a source of fascination to moviegoers in the mid-20th century, lending itself to war dramas and spoofs.

Fantastic voyage asimov