Fantastic Voyage
A diplomat is nearly assassinated. In order to save him, a submarine is shrunken to microscopic size and injected into his blood stream with a small crew. Problems arise almost as soon as they enter the bloodstream.
- Director: Richard Fleischer
- Genre:Adventure / Sci-Fi
- Runtime:96 minutes
Cast
Stephen Boyd : Grant
Raquel Welch : Cora
Edmond O’Brien : General Carter
Donald Pleasence: Dr. Michaels
Arthur O’Connell: Col. Donald Reid
The United States and the Soviet Union have both developed technology that allowed matter to be miniaturized using a process that shrinks individual atoms, but its value is limited because any object shrunk return to normal size after 60 minutes.
Scientist Jan Benes, working behind the Iron Curtain, has figured out how to make the shrinking process work indefinitely. With the help of the CIA, he escapes to the West, but an attempted assassination leaves him comatose, with a blood clot in his brain.
To save his life, Charles Grant (the agent who extracted him, played by Stephen Boyd), pilot Captain Bill Owens (William Redfield), Dr. Michaels (who is later revealed to have a fear of small spaces, played by Donald Pleasence), surgeon Dr. Peter Duval (Arthur Kennedy) and his assistant Cora Peterson (Raquel Welch) board a specially designed nuclear submarine, the Proteus, which is then miniaturized and injected into Benes. The ship is reduced to one micrometre in length, giving the team only one hour to repair the clot; after that, the submarine will begin to revert to its normal size and become large enough for Benes’ immune system to detect and attack.
The crew faces many obstacles on their journey. They are forced to detour through the heart (a temporary cardiac arrest must be induced to avoid destructive turbulence), through the inner ear (all in the lab must remain quiet to prevent similar turbulence) and replenish their supply of oxygen in the alveoli of the lungs . When the surgical laser needed to destroy the clot is damaged, it becomes obvious there is a saboteur on the mission. They cannibalize their radio to repair the laser. When they finally reach the brain clot, there are only six minutes remaining to operate and then exit the body. Read more
