What an extraordinarily intelligent, absurd, comic, and rare film this is!
To start off with, I had never heard of Director Gregoretti, but he certainly comes up with a work with many touches of genius, thanks to a highly original script bubbling with all types of ideas.
This is a 1963 movie, three years prior to FANTASTIC VOYAGE, and it may well have influenced Richard Fleischer, the director of VOYAGE, as this is also human body-related sci-fi. While VOYAGE involves a human operation on a human body, OMICRON is about an ET invading virus-like a human body, and how it affects that human.
There is an extremely funny, oddball almost, sequence in the hospital where the central character, expertly played by Renato Salvatori, experiences an array of emotions and sensations as he returns to life and as the ET learns to operate the human body it has invaded. That sequence sets the comic/hysterical/hyperbolic tone for the rest of the film, which inevitably includes some not so successful moments, but which on the whole works quite well, not least because the narrative remains active, taut and tight at 86 minutes long.
Great cinematography, action sequences, and crowd choreographies, buoyed up by clever and brisk dialogue, including the ET trying to communicate with his own world for an invasion of Earth.
Along the way, many extremely pertinent and intelligent comments on human society, and how the rich exploit the masses.
One final interesting aside: Nearly 60 years after this film was made, the name OMICRON has now been given to a variant of the Cov-19 virus that has emerged in South Africa and directly attacks the lungs. What an odd coincidence, methinks!
Must-see as intelligent sci-fi and innovative cinema, this film remains current even today.
To start off with, I had never heard of Director Gregoretti, but he certainly comes up with a work with many touches of genius, thanks to a highly original script bubbling with all types of ideas.
This is a 1963 movie, three years prior to FANTASTIC VOYAGE, and it may well have influenced Richard Fleischer, the director of VOYAGE, as this is also human body-related sci-fi. While VOYAGE involves a human operation on a human body, OMICRON is about an ET invading virus-like a human body, and how it affects that human.
There is an extremely funny, oddball almost, sequence in the hospital where the central character, expertly played by Renato Salvatori, experiences an array of emotions and sensations as he returns to life and as the ET learns to operate the human body it has invaded. That sequence sets the comic/hysterical/hyperbolic tone for the rest of the film, which inevitably includes some not so successful moments, but which on the whole works quite well, not least because the narrative remains active, taut and tight at 86 minutes long.
Great cinematography, action sequences, and crowd choreographies, buoyed up by clever and brisk dialogue, including the ET trying to communicate with his own world for an invasion of Earth.
Along the way, many extremely pertinent and intelligent comments on human society, and how the rich exploit the masses.
One final interesting aside: Nearly 60 years after this film was made, the name OMICRON has now been given to a variant of the Cov-19 virus that has emerged in South Africa and directly attacks the lungs. What an odd coincidence, methinks!
Must-see as intelligent sci-fi and innovative cinema, this film remains current even today.