by David Hughes
Directed by Richard Fleischer, best known for Disney’s lavish live-action sci-fi adventure 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, Fantastic Voyage was scripted by Harry Kleiner (later of Bullitt fame) and David Duncan (The Time Machine) from a story by British writer Otto Klement and sci-fi buff Jerome Bixby (aka Jay Lewis Bixby), who wrote the ‘It’s A Good Life’ episode of The Twilight Zone and several notable Star Trek stories, including ‘Mirror, Mirror.’ Although the $6.5 million film — at the time, the most expensive science fiction film ever produced — was hardly a financial success,2Fantastic Voyage was critically lauded for its cutting-edge special effects, colourful production design and imaginative staging by Irwin Allen alumnus Jack Martin Smith, Dale Hennessy and Harper Goff. Critics and audiences alike (mostly) forgave the hefty suspension of disbelief required to get around the spurious science and logical flaws. It was the first and last time a film featuring Raquel Welch would win three Oscars.
Many believed the film was adapted from a novel by legendary science fiction author Isaac Asimov, whose story Fantastic Voyage had been published in serial form in The Saturday Evening Post, and later as a novel, several months before the movie debuted in cinemas. In fact, a year earlier, Asimov had been paid five thousand dollars to write a novelization of the film’s script, initially turning down the proposal because of the story’s logic problems, mostly concerning the miniaturization of certain particles of matter. Asimov relented when told he would be allowed to modify the narrative, and make game attempts to address the more obvious examples of bad science. “I followed the plot line that existed as closely as I could,” he wrote later, “except for changing several of the more insupportable scientific inconsistencies.” Nevertheless, he added, “I was never quite satisfied with the novel, simply because I never felt it to be entirely mine.”
In 1984, by which time the novel had sold a colossal two million copies, Asimov was approached to write a belated sequel to Fantastic Voyage. Doubleday sent him an outline, which, he later recalled, “involved two vessels in the bloodstream, one American and one Soviet, and what followed was a kind of sub-microscopic version of World War III.” Asimov disliked the story and rejected the offer, leading the publisher to approach another science fiction writer, Philip José Farmer, who, according to Asimov, “wrote a novel and sent in the manuscript... It dealt with World War III in the bloodstream, and it was full of action and excitement.” Although Asimov urged Doubleday to accept Farmer’s manuscript, the publisher refused, encouraging him to write a completely new book based on his own ideas. Eventually, Asimov agreed, “on the condition that I do it entirely my own way,” and Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brain was published in 1987. Despite the title, it was not a sequel, but a re-imagining of the original story, in which a team of American and Soviet scientists, working together, are miniaturized and injected into the comatose body of a Soviet counterpart, hoping to unlock the key to the greatest scientific advance in history. “A motion picture may be made from it,” Asimov wrote in the book’s introduction, “but if so, this novel will owe nothing at all to it. For better or for worse, this novel is mine.”
Although no movie was forthcoming, 1987 also saw the cinema release of Joe Dante’s good-natured Fantastic Voyage spoof, Innerspace, starring Dennis Quaid, Martin Short and Meg Ryan. It was not until the mid-1990s, when science fiction began to enjoy mainstream success thanks to The X-Files on television and Independence Day in cinemas, that an official Fantastic Voyage remake was considered financially viable. Like every other studio in town, 20th Century Fox executives began searching its archives to find science fiction properties which might capitalise on that success, and soon stumbled upon Fantastic Voyage. It did not take a genius to see the box office potential of a remake using state-of-the-art special effects, nor that the best people to handle the fast-tracked update might be the brains behind either The X-Files or Independence Day — preferably both. Thus, in 1996, the 30th anniversary of the original Fantastic Voyage, Fox hired Independence Day’s director and producer, Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin.
“When I was a kid,” says Devlin, “my favourite ride at Disneyland was the Monsanto ride [‘Adventure Into Inner Space’], where you would ‘shrink’, and I loved the ride because I loved Fantastic Voyage. It was one of my favourite movies as a kid. So it was just one of those things where I thought, ‘Man, how cool would it be to get to re-do that?’ And you know what they say, ‘Imitation is the sincerest form of Hollywood.’”
Emmerich and Devlin were excited to imagine how Fantastic Voyage might look in the age of computer-generated digital effects, the kind that made films like Independence Day possible. “What was fascinating to us was what we could do digitally, at the time, effects-wise,” he says. “There had been a lot of work done digitizing the human body, so there was a lot of existing digital material of the inside of the human body. And we thought, ‘You know what? If we could make that feel real, and give everybody an adventure inside the human body, that would be the greatest adventure.”
Emmerich and Devlin, avowed fans of The X-Files, brought in two of that show’s most popular writers, Glen Morgan and James Wong, to take a first pass at the screenplay. “Dean Devlin asked us, while we were at lunch in the Fox commissary, if we would be interested in writing Fantastic Voyage,” Morgan remembers. “He gave us some of his ideas, which incorporated nanotechnology and the assassination of the President into the plot. He wanted it set in Tokyo, I think. He pitched us his thoughts and his knowledge of nanotechnology, and, as I recall, gave us much freedom to do what we wanted given his guidelines.” Despite his and Wong’s science fiction credentials — in addition to The X-Files, the pair created Space: Above and Beyond — Morgan had never actually seen the original Fantastic Voyage. “As a kid, [even] through high school, I used to faint at the sight of blood — and in classes where we studied the human body,” he explains. “So it was not a movie I ever would watch. I would have been terrified!” Having overcome his squeamishness in later life, Morgan finally got to see Fantastic Voyage, which he describes as “a great idea made at a time when the visual effects were not truly capable of delivering what needed to be done to depict the interior of the human body. Of course,” he adds, “any film with Raquel Welch in that tight white suit and zipper deal is worth watching!”
Opening with a terrifically effective, screen-filling close-up of a human eye, designed to make the audience feel microscopic, Morgan and Wong’s 139-page first draft begins on 14 June 2014 — at the time of writing, seventeen years in the future. It is the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, and the world is in crisis once again, as President Greer — who, like many movie Presidents of the 1990s, is presciently African-American — attends an emergency summit in Tokyo, hoping to contain the threat of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, an event which many believe may light the fuse on World War III. “We had this idea that it was like a repeat of the assassination of Arch-Duke Ferdinand,” Devlin says, referring to the inciting incident of the Great War. En route to the summit, the President is shot during a failed assassination attempt by “Japanese extremists,” which leaves him comatose, with a potentially fatal blood clot in his brain. “Any attempt to remove the clot via neurosurgical micro-techniques, or even bipolar laser surgery,” a surgeon tells the First Lady, Jocelyn Greer, “could create lesions, damaging the Hippocampus and impairing long term memory processing.” With the President’s injuries threatening to plunge the world into global conflict, a radical solution is proposed: injecting the President with artificially intelligent ‘nanobots’, programmed to clear the obstacle from the inside. Unfortunately, the operation goes disastrously wrong, leading to an even more radical and experimental response: the injection into the President’s bloodstream of a miniaturized submarine, crewed by a group of Navy SEALs, on a mission to destroy the errant nanobots before performing the delicate surgical procedure themselves.
With the world on the brink of nuclear catastrophe, and only the President’s recov
ery able to avert disaster, the Vice-President and First Lady authorize the mission. When an accident grotesquely deforms and kills one of the crew during miniaturization, Secret Service agent Adam Richter — who blames himself for the President’s condition — volunteers in his place. By page fifty-five, the Proteus (which is not miniaturized, having been built at the nano scale) is on its fantastic voyage through President Greer’s bloodstream, on a ‘search and destroy’ mission to the rogue nanobots. Showing the same mastery of military-based action in a science fiction context as their short-lived television show Space: Above and Beyond, Morgan and Wong ramp up the tension and jeopardy, with attacking monocytes, clinging nicotine tar, a potentially fatal power failure, plunging body temperatures and an oxygen shortage — not to mention the deadly, super-intelligent nanobots. All in the surreal, otherworldly setting of the human bloodstream.
Like Asimov, Morgan and Wong did their utmost to explain the scientific thinking behind the miniaturization process. “The molecular construction of a subject is recorded, layer by layer, in a molecular mnemonics system,” Professor Yeo, one of the inventors of the miniaturization technique, explains. “Enzymes, oxidizers and free radical atoms begin breaking chemical bonds. The disassemblers store the subject’s elements. Seventy per cent of the body is water, which is drained from the blood to a minimum level. Chromosomes and certain proteins are not broken down, but are vitrified with cryoprotectants, propylene glycol and dimethyl sulfoxide. The body is then, in essence, redesigned and reconstructed to a nanotomical scale based on its original anatomical ‘blueprint.’” While the excess elements are stored in liquid nitrogen, the biostasis procedure is monitored by robotic engineers. “At the completion of the mission, these very elements are again used by the ‘Universal Assembler’ with the guidance of the molecular mnemonics system to reconstruct the subject, nearly exactly, at the macroscale.” Heck, it sounded convincing.
“At the end of the day,” says Devlin, “what everybody struggles with is people that small being inside the human body. How do you do that without it turning silly? And we never quite bought that part of it. It’s like, that was the one big leap we had to keep on making, and somehow we were never able to convince the studio or anyone else that that leap was credible.” Given the leaps of logic required to make stories like Stargate and Independence Day credible, Emmerich and Devlin had no qualms about exercising artistic license in pursuit of entertainment. “Our rule had always been, if you only ask the audience to do one major leap, you could get away with it. And that’s what our belief was in Fantastic Voyage: we know that’s going to be the one thing you’re gonna have to bite your tongue on, but if everything else feels completely solid, maybe they’ll go with us on it.” Devlin says that, in many cases, it’s a matter of tone. “Roland and I have always felt that what we got away with on Independence Day was down to one little line of dialogue: at the beginning of the third act, Jeff Golblum gives this gigantic speech about how they’re going to fly into the mothership and put in the virus, and they’re gonna launch a bomb... this ridiculous speech. At the end of it, Will Smith says, ‘I’ll fly it up there in that spaceship,’ and Jeff Goldblum says, ‘You really think you can fly that thing?’ And Will Smith says, ‘You really think you can do all that bullshit you just said?’ And it’s just kind of like we turn to the audience and say, ‘All right, we’re having fun here — don’t crawl up your own asses! Just sit back and have fun with us!’”
Sadly, by the time Morgan and Wong delivered their script, on 12 June 1997, the film’s would-be producer and director team, Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin, had left Fox to make Godzilla for Sony. “They had some sort of sudden falling out with Fox, or something,” says Morgan. Neither he nor Wong were privy to the details of the pair’s hasty exit from the studio whose coffers they had recently enriched by over $800 million — not including merchandise, home video and other ancillary markets. “Jim and I were very low on the totem pole of that project,” he adds, “and what really happened between Fox and Dean and Roland was not any of my business.”
“What happened was that when we left Fox, we made a trade. We said we would give up any of our rights on Fantastic Voyage if they would give us Supertanker,” Devlin explains, referring to Emmerich and Devlin’s planned disaster movie, which was sunk by the events of 9/11.
Fantastic Voyage was now adrift, with neither producer nor director shepherding the project towards pre-production. It was at this point that Fox’s executive vice-president of production, Peter Rice, stepped in. “Jim and I got called into his office and questioned about the Fantastic Voyage script,” says Morgan, “and asked if we were interested in doing some notes, but we never heard from Fox again.” With Morgan and Wong moving on (to launch, in 2000, the successful Final Destination franchise), Rice wasted no time drafting in a new screenwriter: Tab Murphy, who had written an imaginative underwater sci-fi yarn for Disney, Atlantis: The Lost Continent, and the unproduced disaster movie, Supertanker, for Emmerich and Devlin. Although it retained the backbone of the plot — the microscopic crew of a miniaturized submarine enter the President’s bloodstream in order to save the President, and by extension the world — Murphy’s version differed from Morgan and Wong’s in a number of ways. As the story begins, the miniaturization process — achieved by mapping the subject’s genetic code, disassembling it atom by atom, then reassembling it on a subatomic level — is still at the testing stage, leading to an horrific accident with a chimpanzee which, like the baboon in David Cronenberg’s The Fly, fails to properly reassemble. As before, the reuinification of China and Taiwan is about to take place, and an historic treaty is about to be signed which, it is hoped, will avert a potential global conflict.
This time, however, the President (in Murphy’s version, a kindly old white guy) is shot by a Taiwanese nationalist — with an experimental bullet which hatches five nanobots, “horrifying metallic micromachines of destruction, their nicknames aptly [describing] their vicious physical appearances: ‘JAWS’, ‘BUZZSAW’, ‘SHREDDER’, ‘SCORPION’ and ‘SPIDER’!”
A team of twelve assorted scientists, nanotechnology experts and Navy SEALs are assembled (and then disassembled and re-assembled), one of whom doesn’t survive the miniaturization process. By page 46, the crew of the Proteus, including Morgan and Wong’s Agent Richter, has been injected into the President’s bloodstream, on a mission to take out the nanobots by destroying their micro-electronic silicon chip ‘brains’ with miniaturized explosives. Interpersonal tensions and frayed tempers are set aside when the crew faces its first challenge – a vicious attack by the nanobots which wipes out the Navy SEALs, leaving only Agent Richter and the scientists to face the mechanized menace with brains, rather than brawn.
“My draft was well received,” says Murphy, “but Peter felt the ‘assembled team of experts’ approach was a little too close to Armageddon, which Disney had released that year. I then embarked on a set of revisions. I remember it took me quite a while to make the revisions, mainly because I was doing a draft on another project for Devlin/Emmerich at the same time. I’m not sure if that had anything to do with the project dying on the vine, but I recall Peter not being too happy with my tardiness.” In any case, he adds, “Unbeknownst to me, the project was apparently dead even before I turned in my revised draft.”
Fantastic Voyage was not adrift again for long. In 1998, it was linked for the first time with James Cameron, the hugely successful writer-director of Aliens, The Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgment Day and True Lies, who had recently gifted Paramount and Fox the biggest movie of all time, Titanic. Cameron was twelve years old when the original Fantastic Voyage was released, and the film no doubt had a place in the young sci-fi fan’s heart. Murphy recalls meeting with Cameron’s regular collaborator, producer Jon Landau, to discuss Fantastic Voyage. “He had read my revised draft, and liked it,” Murphy says, “but felt it was too reverent to the original film.” At the time, he says, Fox was keen to get Cameron on board, either to di
rect or produce.
In the meantime, a company calling itself Fantastic Voyage Associates, who claimed ownership of the title and concept behind the movie, contacted science fiction writer Kevin J Anderson, best known for a series of authorised X-Files, Star Wars and Dune novels, to propose him as author of a new Fantastic Voyage novel. “I remembered the film and the Saturday morning cartoon of Team Proteus involved in numerous microscopic adventures,” he says, referring to the 17 episode Filmation series which ran on ABC-TV from September 1968 to January 1969. “The basic idea had so much potential! How could I not want to be turned loose in that milieu?” Anderson was given no specific direction, “except to create my own story and not connect it directly with the film or characters,” but watched the film and read both of Isaac Asimov’s novels before tackling his own story. “In my novel, Fantastic Voyage: Microcosm, the Proteus team goes where no one has gone before: they explore one of the alien bodies from a crashed UFO, which comes complete with nanotechnology protective mechanisms.” As Anderson toiled on the novel during the year 2000, he recalls reading scattered reports of a possible remake, “but nothing ever came of it. Microcosm, on the other hand, was published on schedule. Another example of the difference between publishing and filmmaking.”
