Fantastic Voyage

Production year: 1966

Science Fiction PG   Running time: 1:40 

IMDB rating:   6.8     Aspect: Wide;  Languages: English, French, Spanish;  Subtitles: English, Spanish;  Audio: DD 5.1

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.

Features

Audio commentary
Featurettes/Behind-The-Scenes/Documentaries
Photo gallery
Trailers/TV spots

Special features

Commentary by Film & Music Historian Jeff Bond
Isolated Score Track with Commentary by Film & Music Historians Jeff Bond, Jon Burlingame and Nick Redman
Lava Lamps & Celluloid: A Tribute to the Visual Effects of Fantastic Voyage
Storyboards-to-Scene Comparison: Whirlpool Scene
Original Prop Stills
Behind-the-Scenes Still Galleries
Fantastic Voyage