Fantastic Voyage (1966)

It was the summer of 1966.
The Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States of America was approaching its apex. The resulting offshoot of this, the space race, was heating up with equal intensity. There would be a man on the moon in three short years. In Southeast Asia, American combat operations began to increase in a small country named Vietnam and the “Summer of Love”, less than a year away, was to define a generation and alter our national discourse.
In Hollywood, the effort was to maintain box office figures despite the growing numbers of viewers foregoing the theater for their televisions. The old studio moguls, once regarded as the infallible augers of public opinion and taste, were dying off or watching the business pass them by. The grand epics which highlighted much of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s (Ben Hur, Cleopatra) were falling out of favor with an audience whose taste (both artistic and social) was demanding something different and new.
With an eye toward all of these factors, 20th Century Fox gambled on a project which was to be the most expensive and ambitious science fiction film in the history of Hollywood. Its name was Fantastic Voyage and instead of taking its viewers to the vastness of outer space or bringing advanced alien cultures to earth, it would internalize the journey into the unseen realms of the human body.
To realize the vision, the studio brought in some of the biggest names in effects and design. L.B. “Bill” Abbott, head of the special effects department at 20th Century Fox from 1957-1970 oversaw much of the $6.5 million production (50% of which was designated for the effects budget) and under his watch the studio became the frontrunner in the industry for technical achievement in the field. Jack Martin Smith designed the large control room and operating theater sets in the L.A. Sports Arena, giving the film a realistic war-room feel. Dale Hennesey (production designer for Logan’s Run, Sleeper and 1976’s King Kong) would create the sets for the interior of the human body blending the psychedelic and biological to great effect. Hennesey would mine this territory again in 1972 designing the sets for the “What Happens During Ejaculation” segment of Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex*.
Harper Goff was hired to make the 42’ “Proteus” submarine ($100,000) which was to be the film’s key element and focus. Full scale and self-contained, the actors could move freely within it. It also contained detachable panels to allow for numerous camera angles. Goff had previously made the “Nautilus” for Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and was a major player in the development of many facets of Disneyland itself.
The idea for the film came from a story by writers Otto Klement and Jerome Bixby (TVs Men Into Space, The Twilight Zone, Star Trek). Originally set in the times of Victorian England (a la The Time Machine and First Men in the Moon) the story was updated to the present day by David Duncan, who not surprisingly scripted the 1960 production of The Time Machine. This provided the film with its more futuristic feel and allowed it to reflect the global/political turbulence of the times. This story was then adapted for the screen by veteran scriptwriter Harry Kleiner (Fallen Angel, House of Bamboo, Bullitt).
The plot begins as a scientist is flown back to the United States under a veil of secrecy. The knowledge he alone possesses could alter the balance of world power for quite some time. A miniaturization process has been developed by the competing superpowers and both have the secret to shrinking anything down to microscopic size. The scientific and military ramifications of the procedure are frighteningly evident. The problem is that neither of the opposing factions can reduce anything for longer than sixty minutes. This scientist has discovered the secret to alleviating the issue. He is being escorted under heavily armed guard to CMDF (Combined Miniature Deterrent Forces) headquarters when the motorcade is ambushed by enemy agents (presumably Soviets). He suffers a blow to the head and becomes comatose with a blood clot in his brain. He must be operated on immediately or the secret will die with him.
The same miniaturization process will be used to shrink a submarine (“Proteus”) with specialists on board so they may enter his bloodstream, travel to the brain and remove the clot by laser surgery. Of course, this all must be accomplished in under sixty minutes.
The crew consists of the nation’s most celebrated brain surgeon Dr. Duval (Arthur Kennedy), his assistant Cara (Raquel Welch), Dr. Michaels (Donald Pleasance), security agent Grant (Stephen Boyd) and pilot Bill Owens (William Redfield). Dr. Michaels will navigate the ship through the arteries to the brain where Dr. Duval will open the clot. Grant is there for the added plot point of possible sabotage as Dr. Duval has been proven to be a bit of an egomaniac with questionable allegiances.
Director Richard Fleischer (Compulsion, Tora, Tora, Tora and Soylent Green) keeps the tension mounting and the pace lively. The film’s opening sequence (the ambush) sets the political backdrop while the subsequent credits (with its sound effects and images of state of the art equipment) lend a clinical, near sterile feel of medical and scientific intensity. The director assures us we are on a visual, almost tactile sort of journey. The first line of dialogue is not uttered until five and half minutes into the film.
Fleischer builds the suspense using various techniques. The phases of the miniaturization process are thorough and intricate. This allows the audience to become comfortable with the detailed science involved without being overwhelmed by loads of jargon and winded exposition. This deliberate pace also girds us for the time crunching frenetic journey to follow. There is some occasional comic interplay (mostly from Grant) but for the most part the film is deadly serious. Adding to the tension is the fact that this technology is brand new to all the film’s entities and there is a sense that, due to military and medical necessity, everything is being undertaken with a dangerous haste.
Once in the body the crew constantly struggles with unforeseen roadblocks and the mission is often imperiled. They are immediately thrown off course by a fistula caused whirlpool in the bloodstream and thrust reluctantly into a vein headed away from the brain. They lose power while heading through the lymphatic system due to air ducts becoming clogged and must scuba outside the sub to clear them. Their air pressure becomes severely low and they must stop off in the lung to refurbish. Due to their straying off course they must go through the heart and ear canal, both fraught with dangers they initially tried to avoid. Antibodies and white blood cells become horrific monsters bent on the ship and crew’s destruction. Add to this an unknown saboteur and the constant feuding between the doctors and the mission seems doomed for failure.
It is a fascinating, suspenseful and well crafted journey. The sets of the interior of the body; arteries, veins, canals, lung and brain are near psychedelic in appearance. The floating corpuscles (filmed in a tank of water using various minerals, oils and jellies) and colors combined with ambient music give the film a trippy hipness unseen to that point in Hollywood. The scuba sequences were all done “dry for wet”; the actors suspended by wires in the enormous sets. A higher film speed gives their movements a slow, under water feel. Scaled down models of the Proteus were used for most of the external shots involving the sub. Matte paintings and blue screen effects were utilized to great advantage despite the technique being in its infancy. Consequently, the film won two Oscars for Art Direction and Special Effects.
What keeps Fantastic Voyage fresh and contemporary is the film’s premise, which predated the concept of nanotechnology by nearly twenty years. The film still seems, some forty years later, a very futuristic vision of scientific possibility. Two years after Voyage’s release Stanley Kubrick would completely subvert and redefine the genre with 2001: A Space Odyssey. But it was not until 1977, when a little movie called Star Wars hit the screen, that a science fiction film would be lauded so highly for its landmark technical achievements.