Fantastic Voyage (DVD)

Time hasn't been kind to this movie. For some reason they want to operate on a defecting scientist who has been injured in an assassination attempt (I believe someone says he is able to make the shrinking process last longer than 60 minutes as an off the cuff remark) and the guy their sending doesn't want to go but has to anyway. The crew is the Navy guy, the doctor who navigates (surely the surgeon could have done that as well negating the need for him?), the surgeon and his assistant to do the operation and the guy for security. He's pointless too, plenty of things get sabotaged and not once does he manage to stop any of them. Then they all decontaminate and ...  Read the complete review

I saw this double feature disc on Amazon and simply HAD to rent it. It was such a nostalgia trip! I can remember sitting down as a kid and watching this on TV in the 1970's on a Sunday evening, and remembered how vividly both films captured my imagination. In Fantastic Voyage (1966), a scientist who knows the secret to keeping people miniaturised indefinitely, escapes from behind the Iron Curtain of the old Soviet Union. The CIA sends an agent to escort him under motorcade to safety, but they are attacked. Unfortunately, the scientist suffers a severe head injury and a blot clot forms inside his brain. the only solution os for a group of American scientists ...  Read the complete review

FANTASTIC VOYAGE was made in 1966 and won an Oscar for its special effects – an Oscar which I believe was well deserved. Although the effects have dated in the sense that they appear to be in a very 1960s psychedelic style, they are still impressive. The storyline has a medical team reduced to the size of microbes, who are given the task of being injected into a human being’s body to cure him of an incurable blood clot on the brain. They have to navigate their way around his body in a nuclear-powered submarine which has also been miniaturised. There is lots of action in the film, and the presence of Raquel Welch in any film makes it more than ...  Read the complete review

One of the all-time great sci-fi ideas, this is the film where a team of crack scientists are miniaturised to perform a complex brain operation on a top politician, and have to battle both the unfamiliar alien territory, and the presence of an evil saboteur on board the microsub (later remade as 'Innerspace'). 'Fantastic Voyage' suffers badly from the fact that the hero is Stephen Boyd, an inherently dislikeable actor for being the closet gay villain in 'Ben Hur'. He is crashingly uninteresting, and thus, the heroics lose some of their sting. Moreover, the diaphanous Raquel Welch is required to do nothing more than look stunning (a job ...  Read the complete review