By: Jonathan Cyfer
The plot goes thus. A Soviet scientist named Jan Benes defects and is smuggled out of the Soviet Union to America by a U.S Agent named Grant, heroically played by Stephen Boyd. On the way from the airport, Soviet agents make a desperate attempt to assassinate Benes by crashing a vehicle into the car transporting him. There's a subsequent gun fight but the Soviets are beaten back. Unfortunately, Benes is injured in the crash. There's a blood clot in his brain that has put him into a coma. It's inoperable through conventional means but there's still a way to save Benes...by miniaturizing a medical team aboard a submarine and injecting the craft into Benes' bloodstream. The operation will literally take place inside Benes' brain, with the surgeon (Dr Duval played by Arthur Kennedy) using a portable laser for a scalpel.
Apparently both sides have miniaturization but the problem is, objects shrunken down can only remain at their small size for exactly 60 minutes. Benes successfully discovered a method of prolonging the miniaturization process. To get the secret (and probably for humanitarian reasons as well), the Americans must save his life by removing the blood clot. The first problem is, because of the inherit limitation of the miniaturization process; the team must complete their task in only one hour. After that, they will automatically start to grow and become vulnerable to the body’s defenses, principally white corpuscles, and be destroyed. But there’s more.
Grant, the agent who rescued Benes from behind the Iron Curtain, is assigned to the mission supposedly as the sub’s radio operator but really as security. One of the medical team is suspected of being a Soviet agent who will do anything to make sure the operation doesn't succeed, but no one knows who it is. The prime suspect is Dr Duval himself, a brilliant neurosurgeon, but very difficult to work with. Others on the mission who could be the agent are Duval's lovely assistant Cora (played by 1960s sex symbol Raquel Welch who, in this film, appears in nothing more alluring than a form fitting wet suit), Dr Michaels (played by Donald Pleasance), a circulatory expert who acts as navigator for the submarine while it's in Benes' bloodstream, and Captain Owens, the Navy officer who is the pilot of the sub.
I know it sounds hokey, but for its day, the special effects creating the illusion of a tiny sub with miniature people traveling through a human body were first rate. Also, although the cast might not be familiar to younger people today, the stars, such as Raquel Welch, Edmond O'Brien, Donald Pleasance, and Arthur O'Connell were very well known and represented a considerable amount of talent (also science fiction history buffs may remember Pleasance’s role as SEN in George Lucas' first film THX-1138). Forty-four years have passed since the original Fantastic Voyage film was released. Imagine what 21st century CGI technology could do with the concept.
Here's the catch. The screenplay was written by Harry Kleiner, based on a story by Otto Klement and Jerome Bixby. Names you aren't likely to be familiar with. However, Bantam Books brought the rights to the film and hired brilliant science fiction writer Isaac Asimov to write the novelization. Asimov supposedly complained quite a bit about the poor science and various plot holes in the screenplay and was given permission to write the novel more to his liking. However Asimov was never really satisfied with the original novel.
Asimov finally wrote an original story based on the Fantastic Voyage premise which was published in 1988 as Fantastic Voyage II. Asimov creates a cast of much less stereotypical and much more human characters with the action set this time in a fictional Soviet Union of the 21st century (Asimov's ability to predict the future via science fiction didn't include foreseeing the falling of the Berlin Wall). Asimov's novel fixes the poor science of the original film more completely than his 1960s novelization could (though we're still talking about make-believe technology, of course), and an adventure truly worthy of Asimov's talents was created. It would be a fantastic (pardon the pun) way to re-launch the film by basing it on Asimov's more superior 1980s treatment of the subject.
The idea for a remake has been in “development hell” since Asimov wrote Fantastic Voyage II and to the best of my knowledge, the film is no closer now to being reborn than when the novel was published 22 years ago.
While no longer a weapon, the technology of miniaturization has a wide variety of amazing applications in Asimov's vision, not just in the medical sciences, but startlingly enough in the areas of anti-gravity and high speed space travel as well. This is a story that was compelling in 1966 and could really be brought to fruition if mad e today. If anyone out there reading this has the ability to do something about getting the remake moving again, please, please do so. Done right, Fantastic Voyage II would be a blockbuster.
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