Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea / Fantastic Voyage

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Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea gets a dose of On the Beach in Irwin Allen's visually impressive but scientifically silly Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. While the Seaview, the world's most advanced experimental submarine, maneuvers under the North Pole, the Van Allen radiation belt catches fire, giving the concept "global warming" an entirely new dimension. As the Earth broils in temperatures approaching 170 degrees F, Walter Pidgeon's maniacally driven Admiral Nelson hijacks the Seaview and plays tag with the world's combined naval forces on a race to the South Pacific, where he plans to extinguish the interstellar fire with a well-placed nuclear missile. But first he has to fight a mutinous crew, an alarmingly effective saboteur, not one but two giant squid attacks, and a host of design flaws that nearly cripple the mission (note to Nelson: think backup generators). Barbara Eden shimmies to Frankie Avalon's trumpet solos in the most formfitting naval uniform you've ever seen, fish-loving Peter Lorre plays in the shark tank, gloomy religious fanatic Michael Ansara preaches Armageddon, and Joan Fontaine looks very uncomfortable playing an armchair psychoanalyst. It's all pretty absurd, but Allen pumps it up with larger-than-life spectacle and lovely miniature work. --Sean Axmaker

Fantastic Voyage
2001: A Space Odyssey took the world on a mind-bending trip to outer space, but Fantastic Voyage is the original psychedelic inner-space adventure. When a brilliant scientist falls into a coma with an inoperable blood clot in the brain, a surgical team embarks on a top-secret journey to the center of the mind in a high-tech military submarine shrunk to microbial dimensions. Stephen Boyd stars as a colorless commander sent to keep an eye on things (though his eyes stay mostly on shapely medical assistant Raquel Welch), while Donald Pleasance is suitably twitchy as the claustrophobic medical consultant. The science is shaky at best, but the imaginative spectacle is marvelous: scuba-diving surgeons battle white blood cells, tap the lungs to replenish the oxygen supply, and shoot the aorta like daredevil surfers. The film took home a well-deserved Oscar for Best Visual Effects. Director Richard Fleischer, who turned Disney's 1954 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea into one of the most riveting submarine adventures of all time, creates a picture so taut with cold-war tensions and cloak-and-dagger secrecy that niggling scientific contradictions (such as, how do miniaturized humans breathe full-sized air molecules?) seem moot. --Sean Axmaker

Customer Reviews:

Oldies but goodies........2007-02-09

Adventure in the old fashioned way, special effects that were great for their day!

Great voyage into my youth!.......2007-01-04

I remember these two movies when I was a boy. The DVD and packaging are just fine. No complaints and delivery was excellent! Received everything ahead of time! No complaints on resolution quality of films. Will make a great addition to my home library. Thanks for the opportunity to buy on Amazon!

Two historic benchmarks in sci-fi and special effects...........2006-08-12

Irwin Allen may never be recognized as one of the USA's greatest film directors a la Kazan, Welles, Stevens, Coppola, or Kubrick, but he has given us some fine and truly imaginative science fiction over the 60's-70's. "Fantastic Voyage" is a case in point.

A trip thru "inner-space"--the human body--this film's premise, although strictly fantasy, was an absorbing and fascinating glimpse into the the true potential of science fiction. Despite these limitations, and the lack of drama to sustain a viable narrative, one reponds to "Fantastic Voyage" both visually and aesthetically.

While the plot is rather thin and somewhat silly, reflecting the era's cold war overtones, the film works magnificently on a purely visual level with special effects that are convincing and awe-inspiring. Richard Fleischer, a well-established director for TV at the time, bathed the sets with pulsating and multi-colored lights, giving the giant reproductions of the heart, lungs, and brain a greater sense of reality, fluidity, and movement.

As a production note, MD's inspected the sets and were consultants during the filming of the picture. Perhaps the most impressive set was that of the human heart--40 by 30 feet--with the actors suspended by "invisible wires" as they make their journey thru the human body.
As for "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea," lacking both the imagination and the creativity of the former, was the inspiration for the long-running series starring Richard Basehart and David Hedison. Walter Pidgeon offers a commanding presence in the film, Frankie Avalon sings, and supporting actors (including a young and lovely Barbara Eden)also manage to keep the plot moving along nicely.

Despite a wordy and rather mundane script, there is enough action to sustain most audiences. Like in "Fantastic Voyage," the special effects--especially the $400,000 (yes, it was that expensive!) model of the submarine Seaview--are both noteworthy and impressive.

Two Really Great Oldies.......2006-06-06

Fantastic Voyage and Voyage To The Bottom of the Sea are two masterpieces of early science fiction that are just full of adventure and excitement; the kind of movies that you would sit down with your popcorn and happily kill a Saturday afternoon with.

I was especially impressed with the Fantastic Voyage. Younger folks would now consider the special effects of this movie to be "cheesey" but for 1968 they were cutting edge and you can see the influence they had in other movies of that era such as the Andromeda Strain and the Forbin Project. Whereas Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea was another one of Irwin Allen's great creations loaded with action and suspense; from the movie later came the TV show and you can easily see why the television show is almost unchanged from the movie; only the lead actors are different becuse you can't improve on perfection.

I only wonder why do they always have to have such great movies in the letterbox format for DVDs. They don't do it to the videotape versions, so why do it here?

Sealab 2019.......2006-02-04

When it was released, most viewers found Fantastic Voyage, written by Isaac Asimov, compelling and visionary. In retrospect, I don't think the sets hold up very well. So why the five stars? What does hold up very well is the pilot film of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (here packaged with FV on a double sided disc). It's beautifully filmed in '60s Technicolor (which is basically four color), with wonderful lighting and sets (later used in the VTBOS series). Barbara Eden is excellent as the nurse. Walter Pidgeon is memorable in the role although I very much liked the TV show's personnel roster. Often dismissed, I find this film eminently watchable and a wonderful example of '60s sci-fi fare.

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