Fantastic Voyage

One of the strangest science fiction premises of the 1960s: a submarine and its crew are shrunk to microscopic size and injected into a person's bloodstream. The reason: an important scientist is in a coma with an inoperable clot in his brain, and the crew has sixty minutes, because that is how long the miniaturisation holds. All of the film's value is in the design. The heart, the lungs, the inner ear and the brain were built as enormous sets with the studio resources of the period, and the human body was turned into landscape with coloured fluid, fog and light. The science is weak and the images still work. Richard Fleischer directed, with Stephen Boyd, Raquel Welch and Donald Pleasence. It won Best Art Direction and Best Visual Effects at the 39th Academy Awards. Isaac Asimov's novel of the same name was written from the screenplay and published before the film came out, which left decades of people assuming the film was adapted from the book. The relation runs the other way. Still watchable for anyone who likes classical science fiction and the era of practical effects. For a viewer used to modern pacing, the middle section drags.