Tuesday 27 April 2010

Film: Fantastic Voyage, 1966, RIchard Fleischer


Fantastic Voyage is a 1966 science fiction film, based around the exploration of the human body and how alienate it can be. Its story evolves a group of scientists, who plan to go on a mission inside a fellow scientist body, who has suffered from an injury near the brain. This mission consists on a crew embarking in a specially customized submarine, which has to be shrunk into microscopic proportions so it is able to enter the human body. The objective is to fight the so called injury and extinct from the scientist's organism. Although, it seems a easy trip inside the human body, it becomes really difficult when everything seems to go the wrong way, provoking the mission almost to abort several times.


What really struck in this film was the visual, although is visible the use of composite of 2 planes, background and foreground that can appear quite outdated, the background images were just delightful the use of fascinating colours with really weird organisms were a really eye-candy, creating abstract atmospheres never seen by men. It can quite relate to the Avatar of that period. with all those fluorescent abstract landscapes. Also the use of a quite modern and abstract soundtrack, such as sound effects or music, was key to help conveying the action and in fact emphasise it.

The down part of the whole film was the narrative, not that I disliked it but I found quite simple, and were a lot of faults in the way the action was carried through, from the slow initial stage where it takes 5 mins to shrink the submarine to a distance felt when the actual characters were in danger( maybe more a camera work fault).


Overall, it will help me to understand how I will be able to create similar environments, and how I will apply dynamism to the camera movements to produce a rather more interesting animation.

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