Fantastic Voyage is a 1966 American science fiction adventure film directed by Richard Fleischer and written by Harry Kleiner, based on a story by Otto Klement and Jerome Bixby. The film is about a submarine crew which is shrunk to microscopic size and ventures into the body of injured scientist Dr. Jan Benes to repair damage to his brain. In adapting the story for his script, Kleiner added a Cold War element. The film starred Stephen Boyd, Raquel Welch, Edmond O'Brien, Donald Pleasence, and Arthur Kennedy.
Bantam Books obtained the rights for a paperback novelization based on the screenplay and approached Isaac Asimov to write it. Because the novelization was released six months before the film, many people mistakenly believed that the film was based on Asimov's book. Its modern and imaginative production design received five nominations at the 39th Academy Awards, mostly in technical departments, winning for Best Visual Effects and Best Art Direction in Color.
The film used the concept of miniaturization in science fiction along with The Incredible Shrinking Man and inspired an animated television series of the same name.
Plot The United States and the Soviet Union have both developed technology that can miniaturize matter by shrinking individual atoms, but only for one hour. A scientist, Dr. Jan Benes, working behind the Iron Curtain, has figured out how to make the process work indefinitely. With the help of American intelligence agents, including agent Charles Grant, he escapes to the Western world and arrives in New York City, but an attempted assassination leaves him comatose with a blood clot in his brain that no surgery can remove from the outside.
To save his life, Grant, United States Navy submariner Captain Bill Owens, medical chief and circulatory specialist Dr. Michaels, surgeon Dr. Peter Duval, and his assistant Cora Peterson are placed aboard a Navy ichthyology submarine at the Combined Miniature Deterrent Forces (CMDF) facilities. The submarine, named Proteus, is then miniaturized to "about the size of a microbe", and injected into Benes' body. The team has 60 minutes to get to the clot, remove it, and exit Benes' body; if they do not get out in time, the Proteus and its crew will begin reverting to their normal size, which will either place them under attack from Benes' immune system or kill Benes himself.
The crew faces many obstacles during the mission. An undetected arteriovenous fistula forces them to detour through the heart, where cardiac arrest must be induced to reduce turbulence that would be strong enough to destroy the Proteus. The crew faces an unexplained loss of oxygen and must replenish their supply in the lungs. They notice "rocks" that are actually carbon particles from smoke. Grant finds the surgical laser needed to destroy the clot was damaged from the turbulence in the heart, as it was not fastened down as it had been before: this and his safety line snapping loose while the crew was refilling their air supply lead Grant to suspect a saboteur is on the mission. The crew must cannibalize their wireless radio to repair the laser, cutting off all communication and guidance from the outside, although because the submarine is nuclear-powered, surgeons and technicians outside Benes's body can still track their movements via a radioactive tracer, allowing General Alan Carter and Colonel Donald Reid, the officers in charge of CMDF, to figure out the crew's strategies as they make their way through the body.
The sub enters the lymphatic system, but the reticular fibers start to interfere. This forces the crew to pass through the inner ear, requiring all outside personnel to make no noise to prevent destructive shocks, but while the crew is removing reticular fibers clogging the submarine's vents and making the engines overheat, a fallen surgical tool causes the crew to be thrown about and Peterson to be nearly killed by antibodies, but they are able to reboard the submarine in time. By the time they finally reach the clot, the crew has only six minutes remaining to operate and then exit the body.
Before the mission, Grant had been briefed that Duval was the prime suspect as a potential surgical assassin, but as the mission progresses, he instead begins to suspect Michaels. During the surgery, Michaels knocks out Owens and takes control of the Proteus while the rest of the crew is outside for the operation. As Duval finishes removing the clot with the laser, Michaels tries to crash the submarine into the same area of Benes' brain to kill him. Grant fires the laser at the ship, causing it to veer away and crash, and Michaels to get trapped in the wreckage with the controls pinning him to the seat, which attracts the attention of white blood cells. While Grant saves Owens from the Proteus, Michaels is killed when a white blood cell consumes the ship. The remaining crew quickly swims to one of Benes' eyes and escapes through a tear duct seconds before returning to normal size.
Cast
Production The film was the original idea of Otto Klement and Jerome Bixby. They sold it to Fox, which announced the film would be "the most expensive science-fiction film ever made". Richard Fleischer was assigned to direct and Saul David to produce; both men had worked at the studio before. Fleischer had originally studied medicine and human anatomy in college before choosing to be a film director. Harry Kleiner was brought in to work on the script.
The budget was set at $5 million. The budget went up to $6 million, $3 million of which went on the sets, and $1 million on test footage.
The Proteus submarine was constructed as a full-size set piece 42 feet long, first seen in the "miniaturizer" room and later in scenes set outside the lung and inside the inner ear, when the cast was to be seen "swimming" (actually suspended by wires) outside the submarine. The full-size Proteus mockup contained all the interior sets that the actors are seen in to represent the interior of the submarine, with sections that could be pulled out to allow for cameras and crew to film the interior. The submarine was also constructed in miniature, including a large miniature around five feet in length that could be flown on wires in the abstract sets representing the inside of the human body. The heart and brain sets built to accommodate the 5-foot miniature filled a soundstage on the Fox lot—these were filmed "dry for wet", with floating, blob-shaped elements meant to be blood cells filmed separately and composited over the footage. A smaller, 18-inch miniature of the Proteus was constructed to operate in liquid for a shot of the submarine bursting through an arterial wall early in the film. A tiny Proteus miniature just a few inches in length was made for the miniaturization sequence to show the ship being picked up by a "precision handling device" and dropped into a large glass cylinder that was then miniaturized to become part of a syringe that would inject the Proteus into the brain-injured scientist.
The film starred Stephen Boyd, making his first Hollywood film in five years. It was the first role at Fox for Raquel Welch, who was put under contract to the studio after being spotted in a beauty contest by Saul David's wife.
For the technical and artistic elaboration of the subject, Fleischer asked for the collaboration of two people of the crew that he had worked with on the production of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, the film he directed for Walt Disney in 1954. The designer of the Nautilus from the Jules Verne adaptation, Harper Goff, also designed the Proteus; the same technical advisor, Fred Zendar, collaborated on both productions.
At one point in the film's preproduction it was positioned as one of the Derek Flint spy spoof films starring James Coburn, which were produced by 20th Century Fox and Saul David. Several script pages sampled in the bonus features of the 2012 DVD release of Fantastic Voyage show Stephen Boyd's Charles Grant character (who, like Flint, is a secret agent) being identified as Flint, and some of Flint's wisecracks about not wanting to be miniaturized survive to be uttered by Boyd's Grant in Fantastic Voyage. Years later comic actor Mike Myers proposed making an installment of his own Austin Powers spy spoof films called Shagtastic Voyage, in which Austin Powers would be injected into the body of Dr. Evil.
The military headquarters is , and the Proteus . The artery, in resin and fiberglass, is long and wide; the heart is , and the brain is . The plasma effect was produced by chief operator Ernest Laszlo via the use of multicolored turning lights, placed on the outside of translucent decors.
"There are no precedents so we must proceed by trial and error", said David.
Frederick Schodt's book The Astro Boy Essays: Osamu Tezuka, Mighty Atom, and the Manga/Anime Revolution claims that Fox had wanted to use ideas from an episode of Japanese animator Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy in the film, but it never credited him.
Isaac Asimov, asked to write the novelization from the script, declared that the script was full of plot holes, and received permission to write the book the way he wanted. The novel came out first because he wrote quickly and because of delays in filming.Asimov 1980:363
Music The score was composed and conducted by Leonard Rosenman. The composer deliberately wrote no music for the first four reels of the film, before the protagonists enter the body of Dr. Jan Benes (Jean Del Val). Rosenman wrote that "the harmony for the entire score is almost completely atonal except for the very end when our heroes grow to normality".
Reception The film received mostly positive reviews and a few criticisms. The weekly entertainment-trade magazine Variety gave the film a positive pre-release review, stating: "The lavish production, boasting some brilliant special effects and superior creative efforts, is an entertaining, enlightening excursion through inner space—the body of a man." Bosley Crowther of The New York Times wrote: "Yessir, for straight science-fiction, this is quite a film—the most colorful and imaginative since Destination Moon" (1950). Richard Schickel of Life magazine wrote that the rewards would be "plentiful" to audiences who get over the "real whopper" of suspended disbelief required. He found that though the excellent special effects and sets could distract from the scenery's scientific purpose in the story, the "old familiar music of science fiction" in lush new arrangements was a "true delight", and the seriousness with which screenwriter Kleiner and director Fleischer treated the story made it more believable and fun. Schickel made note of, but dismissed, other critics' allegations of "camp".
, the film holds a 91% approval rating at review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes from 35 reviews, with an average rating of 7/10. The website's critics consensus reads: "The special effects may be a bit dated today, but Fantastic Voyage still holds up well as an imaginative journey into the human body." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the a score of 72 out of 100, based on 9 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.
Box office According to Fox records, the film needed to earn $9,400,000 in rentals to break even and made $8,880,000, meaning it initially showed a slight loss, but television sales moved it into the black, and subsequent home video sales were almost entirely profit.
Awards and honors The film won two Academy Awards (1966) and was nominated for three more: Won: Best Art Direction – Color (Jack Martin Smith, Dale Hennesy, Walter M. Scott, Stuart A. Reiss) Best Special Effects (Art Cruickshank) Nominated: Best Cinematography (Ernest Laszlo) Best Film Editing (William B. Murphy) Best Sound Editing (Walter Rossi)
Adaptations Novelization