"Fantastic Voyage" represents a variation on the familiar genre of the outer space adventure, except that it's set inside the human body (to be precise, inside the human circulatory system.) Featuring a pretty decent cast, including such folk as Donald Pleasance and Raquel Welch, the story follows a team of physicians and scientists as they're put in a special submarine and then miniaturized and injected into the bloodstream of a famous scientist so that they can travel into his brain to repair a blood clot from the inside, since it can't be reached from the outside. Along the way they face a number of challenges, including attacks from human antibodies and white corpuscles as well as apparent sabotage from one of the team.
Overall it's a fun movie and a good adventure that even manages to educate the viewer a bit about the human body and how it works. I appreciated that Welch's role was a fairly substantive one. She wasn't just window dressing and there was no cliché romance between her and any of the crew. She comes across as a capable and dedicated scientist. The movie tries but largely fails to introduce mystery about the identity of the saboteur by giving us the prime suspect (in everybody's eyes) pretty much right off the top but anybody watching this is going to know that's just too easy, and it's actually pretty obvious who the real saboteur is. So there's no real mystery about his identity; just about whether he'll succeed in preventing the team from accomplishing its mission.
The movie features pretty good special effects and realistic enough sets. It's not a cheap-looking movie by any means, and it's enjoyable pretty much all the way through.
Overall it's a fun movie and a good adventure that even manages to educate the viewer a bit about the human body and how it works. I appreciated that Welch's role was a fairly substantive one. She wasn't just window dressing and there was no cliché romance between her and any of the crew. She comes across as a capable and dedicated scientist. The movie tries but largely fails to introduce mystery about the identity of the saboteur by giving us the prime suspect (in everybody's eyes) pretty much right off the top but anybody watching this is going to know that's just too easy, and it's actually pretty obvious who the real saboteur is. So there's no real mystery about his identity; just about whether he'll succeed in preventing the team from accomplishing its mission.
The movie features pretty good special effects and realistic enough sets. It's not a cheap-looking movie by any means, and it's enjoyable pretty much all the way through.