Fantastic Voyage (1966)

Fantastic Voyage (1966) – To save the life of a scientist who has discovered how to shrink human beings to extremely small sizes, a surgical team is shrunk so they can perform the life-saving procedure from inside the patient’s body.

Directed by Richard Fleischer                   Starring – Stephen Boyd, Raquel Welch, Edmund O’Brien

This was state of the art science fiction movie making in 1966.  As is often the case, the special effects don’t age well.  The number that still look good in this movie is impressively high.  The budget allowed for impressive and complex effects that were stunning then and hold up well even today.

Sadly, most people just think of this as a Raquel Welch movie.  Welch plays the assistant to the surgeon.  She is the tech in charge of the fancy laser gun for the surgery.  She plays the role straight, this is a serious young woman doing a serious job.  But the obligatory skin-tight, late 60’s costume is what most people remember.  She looks great and does a nice job.

The cast is made up of lower level stars (Stephen Boyd won a Golden Globe for his work on “Ben Hur”) and veteran character actors (Donald Pleasance, O’Brien, Arthur O’Connell and Arthur Kennedy).  Welch’s career launched with this role.  She was signed to a studio contract and made the legendary “One Million Years, B.C.”.  Her fur bikini costume in that movie made her an international sex symbol.  They all work together very well here.

Honestly, there’s not a lot of depth to the story.  It’s a straightforward adventure film within the boundaries of science fiction.  The cast and the director keep things moving nicely and the special effects are the real stars of the show.  The depictions of the denizens of the circulatory system were considered quite impressive.  What makes its way onto the screen is a story that’s fun, and exciting with some intellectual challenge thrown in as well.

There still remains a legend that science fiction giant Isaac Asimov wrote a book that was the basis of the movie.  In fact, he was hired to write the novelization of the script.  Because he wrote faster than the movie could be made, the book came out before the premiere, leading to the confusion.

Why I Liked It – Solid science fiction where the impressive special effects are still secondary to the story they are telling.

Rating – **** Recommended