20,000 Mm. Under the Skin

Fantastic Voyage is the most expensive ($6,500,000) sci-fi spectacle of all time, and maybe the most entertaining since the world was terrorized by a hairy rubber doll named King Kong.

The year is 1995, and the science of micronics has learned how to reduce objects and even people to the size of a bacterium--for 60 minutes. After a Czech scientist discovers how to prolong miniaturization, U.S. agents spirit him across the Atlantic. Alas, before he can explain the discovery, he is attacked by enemy operatives and left in a coma caused by a blood clot in midbrain. Since no conventional operation is possible, the high command approves a daring plan: a miniaturized submarine with a crew of shrunken specialists (led by Stephen Boyd and Raquel Welch) is injected into the carotid artery by hypodermic needle, with orders to navigate the bloodstream to the stricken area, where a surgeon (Arthur Kennedy) will excise the clot with an itsy-bitsy laser gun.

The minuscule sub survives the 3G power dive into the artery, and glides idyllically down a clear stream filled with pink and white corpuscles that look like house-sized globules of tapioca. Then all at once it is swept into a violent whirlpool set up by a fistula that unnaturally connects the carotid artery with the jugular vein. When the hemonauts come out of their spin, they are in the jugular, drifting inexorably away from the brain and toward the heart.

The heart! With horror the voyagers realize that the only way back to the brain lies through the gnashing organ whose terrible turbulence would smash their delicate ship to smithereens. Then all at once top brass (Edmond O'Brien and Arthur O'Connell) has a dazzling idea: if the patient's heart were stopped for 60 seconds, the submarine might squeak through the right ventricle without getting tangled in the chordae tendineae that hang there in hundreds like looping lianas.

Sure enough, it squeaks through, and as the heart once more explodes into action the voyagers are hurled into even more photogenic adventures. To replenish their air supply, they snorkel through the gauzy wall of a capillary into a shocking-pink lung where the lightest breath hurls the homunculi about like twigs in a tornado. A bit later, the "foreign body" of Actress Welch is attacked with understandable enthusiasm by antibodies that look like jellyfish made of household cement.

The climax comes at the site of the clot, where the navigator (Donald Pleasence) turns out to be an enemy agent, hijacks the sub, and tries to kill the patient by ramming a neural ganglion. Not a second too soon, Hemonaut Boyd sinks the sub with the laser gun. The villain is then devoured, head first, by a white cell that resembles a large, aggressive hominy grit. Whereupon the survivors follow the optic nerve until they squirt out of the tear duct and are rescued from a teardrop that looks like Lake Michigan. And then back, BACK, BACK to normal size.

So who needs the A.M.A. seal of approval?

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