Fantastic Voyage, Quickie Review Out of this set of Quickshots, this is arguably the most "classic" film. It's well known, it was creative, it was all fancy-schmancy, it's in color
It was about this guy that's super important and requires an emergency operationone that can only be accomplished by taking a team of specialists, shrinking them down inside an equally shrunk "submarine" and injecting it into him so they can make a farciful, er, fantastic voyage to the problem in his brain. Wherein they're going to use a snazzy laser to blast away the problem (which is a clot or tumor or something). Well, the film is largely done in "real-time" and follows the crew as they have an hour of misadventure and endless difficulty in finding their way to the brain. Why an hour? Well, after that, they re-big-ulize inside the comatose dude.
Well, I'm sure that for the time, the special effects here were just awesome. But now, by god, they're pretty awful. What we have is a collection of "acid trip" cinematography somewhere cross between 2001: A Space Odyssey and a lava lamp. For whatever reason, the inside of the human body is awash with the color blue. And rather than specific terms, an awful lot of stuff is referred to as "corpuscles." Occasionally, the imagery is pretty neat, but a lot of it doesn't make much sense. Apparently, the inside of the human body is filled with some sort of atmosphere somewhere between liquid and gas as our heroes spend a lot of time "swimming" through open areas. Also laughable is the technology on hand. Who knew something as complex as shrinking a bunch of people down to travel inside the human body could be done without a drop of actual technology? Instead of futuristic TV/Computer screens, we have mirrored reflectors a la an overhead projector in a high school. The best we have is "extremely futuristic" black and white images which make up the maps of the human body with a little light in the background showing, apparently, the position of the craft. Needless to say, time has not been kind to this film. The writing is occasionally nerve-rackingly inane and the atmosphere is painfully light. To top it all off, the film kind of drags and it occasionally pretty dull. To add insult to injury, Raquel Welch never really wears anything revealing or body-hugging! For SF purists or film buffs only.
Nostalgia Score: 7/10, Modern Score: 2/10, Overall: 4/10 (www.ResidentHazard.com)
Well, I'm sure that for the time, the special effects here were just awesome. But now, by god, they're pretty awful. What we have is a collection of "acid trip" cinematography somewhere cross between 2001: A Space Odyssey and a lava lamp. For whatever reason, the inside of the human body is awash with the color blue. And rather than specific terms, an awful lot of stuff is referred to as "corpuscles." Occasionally, the imagery is pretty neat, but a lot of it doesn't make much sense. Apparently, the inside of the human body is filled with some sort of atmosphere somewhere between liquid and gas as our heroes spend a lot of time "swimming" through open areas. Also laughable is the technology on hand. Who knew something as complex as shrinking a bunch of people down to travel inside the human body could be done without a drop of actual technology? Instead of futuristic TV/Computer screens, we have mirrored reflectors a la an overhead projector in a high school. The best we have is "extremely futuristic" black and white images which make up the maps of the human body with a little light in the background showing, apparently, the position of the craft. Needless to say, time has not been kind to this film. The writing is occasionally nerve-rackingly inane and the atmosphere is painfully light. To top it all off, the film kind of drags and it occasionally pretty dull. To add insult to injury, Raquel Welch never really wears anything revealing or body-hugging! For SF purists or film buffs only.
Nostalgia Score: 7/10, Modern Score: 2/10, Overall: 4/10 (www.ResidentHazard.com)