TriumphAnt

Family movie night recently featured a great product of the 60s – Fantastic Voyage. For the recollection of those who might have long ago vacuumed memories of this one completely out of your mental archives, it’s the one where a small team of scientists board a submarine, which is then shrunk to microscopic size in order to be injected into an injured man’s body, because the only way to remove a blood clot on his brain is from within.

Despite some monumentally questionable science (not to mention practical considerations) that should automatically have swiftly relegated this movie to the schlock file, on re-viewing it I was amazed (a) just how much I still enjoy it; and (b) how much of it has remained in my mental archives. I suspect this is because I, like almost every other teen-aged boy on the planet at the time this movie came out, was mightily impressed by Raquel Welch. (Oh alright… “was mightily impressed” = “had the hots for”.) Ask any of us mid-life male baby-boomers today and the role we remember her best in will almost always be one of two: either 1. as Loana, the meticulously researched, authentic Cro-Magnon woman with a startlingly prescient sense of the future application of fur as an essential to fashion in 1 Million Years BC ( http://www.artland.co.uk/page2019cb.htm ) -- a site demonstrating either that at this point in her career she was still so unknown that she has been identified as "Rachel" Welch, or that the site's creator is a typical modern teenaged boy whose principal concern is image and who is possessed of a "close enough" sense of priority for its accompanying text, or 2. as Cora Peterson, the skin-tight diving suited “surgeon’s assistant” in Fantastic Voyage. (http://members.tgforum.com/corafmnoir/fantastic.html )

In fact, one of the movie’s signature recollections (and not just for me, because a lot of contemporary commentaries on the movie also single it out – for example scroll down in the link above) is when a growing army of antibodies have begun attacking her and, like the army of cheap rubber toy boa constrictors they appear to be, are already choking her to death as the energetic male crew members haul her into the sub and begin clawing at the antibodies in order to enable her to breathe. And guess which antibodies get the almost unanimous attention of six feverishly grabbing male hands? Clearly, their reasoning was, “Never mind where the air actually needs to go to get into her body – her nose and mouth – her lungs are right under these, so this is where we have to grab!”

But even our newly-14-year old female offspring also claimed to enjoy it. After we got past the “There were movies then?!!” outburst when I told her it was made in 1966, she confessed a grudging admiration for some of the special effects. In some recent post-viewing Googling, I was surprised to discover that the movie in fact won an Oscar for its visual effects, so apparently I am in a large company of “two thumbs-up”pers for this one.

Other bits that I discovered to my shock I still retain in my head: the logo for the special military unit, “CMDF”, stands for “Combined Miniature Deterrent Forces” (And not only that – I also remember in the Mad Magazine satire of this movie (Fantastecch! Voyage), it was “LSMFT”, and it stood not for the hugely publicized cigarette slogan of the day – “Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco” – but rather for “Laboratory Section for Making Folks Tiny”.)

Some of the scientific inconsistencies? Well, CMDF is a super-secure sterile environment in which the surgeons and military administrators are working. Yet it seems smoking is quite freely allowed, and it is infested with ants (In one scene, Edmund O’Brien stops just before crushing one with his thumb, which prompts his colleague to remark that he appears to have a new respect for life whatever its size. See also, “Horton Hears a Who”, by Dr Seuss – “Because a person’s a person, no matter how small.”)

Except for the sub’s captain (and pilot), the entire mission team is thrown aboard apparently with absolutely zero training. At several points, the captain has to direct other crew members what to do – and then explain to them where the necessary buttons or levers are to fulfill the task – “Open the main flood valves – it’s those levers back on the aft bulkhead beside the blinking lights.”

This is a submarine they’re aboard, one intended for oceanic “piscatorial research” missions we are told. Yet its entire front end is an array of gigantic picture windows that would implode at any depth greater than about 25 feet in the real world.

What I like about Fantastic Voyage is that, unlike so many modern sci-fi movies, the writers clearly felt no need whatsoever to justify or explain either the science or the gaping inconsistencies behind their fiction. “OK… shrink them” and five minutes later, after “Phase 1”, the mission crew are sitting in a toy-sized submarine on the “sterile” floor as giant feet move carefully around outside the sub’s windows. A modern movie would require at least one cutaway, probably several, to a nerdy scientist complicatedly explaining to a reporter or supervising senior military officer the physics of the process. But then this is 1966, and the nit-picky demands of Star Trek fans for good and consistent science have not yet begun to make their impact on the genre.

There’s also a plot device by which the submarine’s power is drawn from a chunk of radioactive matter. Pre-shrinking, it’s utterly invisible. Once they’re shrunk, it’ll be more than enough (“in theory”, explains the captain – does no one pre-test anything in this movie?) to power the sub because they can’t shrink radioactive matter. Why? Who knows? Knowing why was not necessary to move the plot along so the writers don’t bother even trying to pretend to craft a semi-plausible explanation.

Not to mention that the plot calls for everything to resume its normal size after 60 minutes. At that point, most of the team is miraculously recovered by being plucked off an eyeball on a glass slide, while the submarine itself, abandoned as a wreck inside the freshly de-clotted victim, is supposedly being devoured by white corpuscles, conveniently overlooking the fact that the original’s molecules and even the molecules of the water injected into the victim along with the sub, should be expected to resume normal size at the 60-minute mark, blowing the victim – as one might reasonably and gorily expect – to smithereens.

I also love the fact that when the military guys have to explain to the mission security guy what’s going to happen, one of them switches on a big clunky overhead projector, and then lays on colour transparency overlays to show the circulatory system through which they’ll be travelling. No Powerpoint in 1966! Later, when another has to perform a quick calculation to determine if the sub can successfully transit a stopped heart before they have to reactivate it or lose the patient, he whips out a slide rule from his inside tunic pocket and concludes they can do it “with three seconds to spare”. No pocket calculators in 1966!

But meanwhile, a couple things now quite prominent in the real world appear to have been prophesied in Fantastic Voyage. (No, not them. Despite its rather obvious deployment in this movie, the starlet-enhancing, cantilevered push-up half-cup bra had already been invented by engineer and eventual billionaire Howard Hughes for Jane Russell some two decades earlier.)

One example? – the use of a laser in surgery, because it “can be regulated to one five-thousandth of an inch”. It wasn’t until 1982 that discoveries about a laser’s interaction with human tissue led to its widest use in laser eye surgery, first performed on a living human eye in 1991.

Also, the whole concept of using a highly miniaturized piece of machinery – the submarine in this case – certainly anticipated what we today call nanotechnology.

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Speaking of small minds…

Finally, just in case it has occurred to any readers of this blog, with perhaps a trembling sense of fear and apprehension, let me set your mind at ease. Despite my professional and personal interest in things media, except for this note I promise that you will read nothing more in here about Michael Jackson’s trial.

In this latest, albeit sparsely covered example of US justice on parade, unfortunately I can’t imagine where you might be able to find any coverage should you in fact be interested (maybe www.induceprojectilevomiting.com), but regrettably, you’re on your own for this one.