I have an interesting relationship with the movie Fantastic Voyage. In the early 70’s shortly after I discovered reading SF, I read Isaac Asimov’s adaptation of the screenplay into a novel. (It also had an amusing essay by Asimov on why the science in the story was terrible but how he kept to the concepts anyway. A sort of ‘don’t blame me’ disclaimer for the terrible science.)

After reading the novel I really really wanted to see the movie. For young people today it is hard to emotionally understand just how frustrating that was at the time. There was no streaming services, no Internet, no home video market at all. The best one could do, if you had the equipment and the funds, was to order a 16mm copy of the movie and watch it on an honest to god film projector. That was not an option for me. All I could do was grab the weekly edition of TV guide and read it cover to cover hoping that some station would broadcast the film.

They never did.

It was literally decades before I managed to see the movie and the startling changed from script to novel still make the experience rough. Sunday Night scanning was available from HBO Now for streaming I stumbled across Fantastic Voyage and took the nostalgic plunge.

The story is an interesting one. A scientist, irreplaceable in his knowledge, had been spirited out from behind the Iron Curtain. (Kids, go ask your parents) Just before he reaches safety an assassination attempt leaving him comatose with an inoperable blood clot in his brain. Well, inoperable from the outside. Turns out that the government has been developing a process to shrink materials and personal down to the size of microbes. An experimental submarine is crewed with two doctors, an assistant, a naval officer to drive it, and a security man to make sure no enemy agents has slipped aboard, is shrunk down and injected into the scientist to cut away the clot from the inside.

There is a lot of interesting and nearly on target science in the movie, but there are great stretches of hand-waving as well. (Where does all that mass go? Never addressed at all.) That aside Fantastic Voyage is a decent flick with a fine cast. Of course things go wrong, not much drama if that didn’t happen, and of course these is an enemy agent aboard. The special effects are pretty impressive for 1966 and the opening credit scrawl may have inspired the opening of 1971’s The Andromeda Strain.

This is worth watching at least once and particularly if you have HBO Now and can just stream it.