Plot
Stephen Boyd heads a team of scientists sent on a bizarre experimental mission. Through a revolutionary and as-yet-untested process, the scientists and their special motorized vehicle are miniaturized, then injected into the blood stream of a near-death scientist (Jean del Val). Their mission is to relieve a blood clot caused by an assassination attempt. One member of the expedition is bent on sabotage so that the scientist's secrets will die with him. Another member is Raquel Welch, seemingly along for the ride solely because of how she looks in a skintight diving suit. The film's Oscar-winning visual effects (by Art Cruickshank) chart the progress of the voyagers through the scientist's body, burrowing past deadly antibodies, chunks of tobacco residue in the lungs, and other such obstacles. Oscars also went to Jack Martin Smith and Dale Hennesy's art direction and Stuart A. Reiss and Walter M. Scott's set decoration. Fantastic Voyage was later spun off into a Saturday-morning cartoon series. ~ Hal Erickson, RoviReview
Sporting cutting-edge visuals, and not as much leftover camp from the 1950s as you'd think, Fantastic Voyage was one of the more graphically innovative films of the 1960s, heightened by a tense cloud of Cold War paranoia. In the same year that Star Trek hit television, this film truly went where no man had gone before -- into the human blood stream -- with the help of a submarine shrunk to the size of a gnat. This tingling adventure into the unknown is certainly one of the factors that attracted genre director Richard Fleischer, who had helmed 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea 12 years earlier, and he brought a real seriousness of purpose to a project that could have been laughably mounted with cardboard special effects. Instead, the film earned nominations in all Oscar categories pertaining to visuals, winning for both effects and art direction. Starting with the slick opening credits and continuing through an every-moment-counts narrative, which includes a thorough scene devoted to the machinery and process of shrinking the craft, Fleischer imbued the proceedings with a sense of immediacy. Yes, the ship and its miniature crew have to deal with a week's worth of insurmountable problems in a scant 60 minutes, but viewers willingly gave themselves over to it. The scene in which laboratory technicians must remain absolutely silent, in order not to reverberate the comatose patient's eardrum in a way that would be fatal to the crew, is especially taut. A slippery Donald Pleasance and Raquel Welch, in one of her earliest roles, are the most noteworthy acting performances. ~ Derek Armstrong, RoviCast
- Stephen Boyd - Grant
- Raquel Welch - Cora Peterson
- Edmond O'Brien - General Carter
- Donald Pleasence - Dr. Michaels
- Arthur O'Connell - Col. Donald Reid
- William Redfield - Capt. Bill Owens
Credit
Jack Martin Smith - Art Director, Richard Fleischer - Director, William B. Murphy - Editor, Leonard Rosenman - Composer (Music Score), Ben Nye, Sr. - Makeup, Dale Hennesy - Production Designer, Ernest Laszlo - Cinematographer, Saul David - Producer, Stuart A. Reiss - Set Designer, Walter Scott - Set Designer, L.B. Abbott - Special Effects, Art Cruickshank - Special Effects, Emil Kosa, Jr. - Special Effects, David Dockendorf - Sound/Sound Designer, Bernard Freericks - Sound/Sound Designer, Walter Rossi - Sound/Sound Designer, David Duncan - Screenwriter, Harry Kleiner - Screenwriter, Jerome Bixby - Screenwriter, Jay Lewis Bixby - Book Author, Jay Lewis Bixby - Short Story Author, Otto Klement - Short Story Author| Fantastic Seven (1982 Film), Fantastic Series (1992 Film) | |
| Fantastic Voyage (2013 Film), Fantastica (1980 Film) |
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