The adventure of a lifetime occurs not in the outer reaches of space, but inside the human body. An elite team of medical and scientific specialists race to save a top government scientist who is suffering from a blood clot on the brain. Their mission: be reduced along with their submarine-like craft to microscopic size, enter the bloodstream of the ailing scientist, and journey to the brain to perform an emergency procedure. With only sixty minutes to complete their mission, the scientist find themselves fighting off an attack by white corpuscles, caught in a tornado-like storm in the lungs, and struggling to survive sabotage from one of their own.
2001: A Space Odyssey took the world on a mind-bending trip to outer space, but Fantastic Voyage is the original psychedelic inner-space adventure. When a brilliant scientist falls into a coma with an inoperable blood clot in the brain, a surgical team embarks on a top-secret journey to the center of the mind in a high-tech military submarine shrunk to microbial dimensions. Stephen Boyd stars as a colorless commander sent to keep an eye on things (though his eyes stay mostly on shapely medical assistant Raquel Welch), while Donald Pleasance is suitably twitchy as the claustrophobic medical consultant. The science is shaky at best, but the imaginative spectacle is marvelous: scuba-diving surgeons battle white blood cells, tap the lungs to replenish the oxygen supply, and shoot the aorta like daredevil surfers. The film took home a well-deserved Oscar for Best Visual Effects. Director Richard Fleischer, who turned Disney's 1954 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea into one of the most riveting submarine adventures of all time, creates a picture so taut with cold-war tensions and cloak-and-dagger secrecy that niggling scientific contradictions (such as, how do miniaturized humans breathe full-sized air molecules?) seem moot. --Sean Axmaker
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.5 / 5.0
The third great science fiction film of the 1960's:
Sci-fi fans will, more than likely, consider two films from 1968 as being the best of the genre: "2001: A Space Odyssey" and "Planet of the Apes. To that duo, however, I would like to add "Fantastic Voyage," from two years earlier and also from Twentieth Century Fox, the studio that released "Planet" and its seguels. As fans and film buffs know, "Voyage" tells the tale of a special team miniaturized in order the save a dying scientist from a life-threatening blood clot, the result of an assassination... more info
A classic not to be missed:
If you have ever visited EPCOT Center at Disney World in Florida, you might have visited the pavilion where one of the favorite rides allows visitors to take a trip, not to outer space but to the inner space of the human body. This movie provides a rare view to the circulatory and respiratory systems of our anatomy. The plot starts with a scientist arriving in the USA to deliver the secret formula for a weapon that would give us the edge in the race for technological power. The enemy tries to... more info
Fantastic Voyage - A fantastic memory of the 60's:
Fantastic Voyage was a good (four star) sci-fi film made smack dab in the middle of the 60's. The story line was authored by Isaac Asimov and made a good transfer to film. I couldn't think of a much more representative sci-fi film of the cold war years and this film had all the trappings. I won't describe the story line except to say that it predicted a very improbable form of what we today call "nano-technology". It was, nevertheless, very entertaining and featured good actors of the day and very... more info
excellent old sci-fi:
This is an excellent 60"s sci-fi film. It was done with intelligent thinking and the special effects are great for that time.
