Fantastic Voyage (1966) on Netflix
PG19661h 40mAdventureFamilySci-Fi
A scientist who solved miniaturization lies comatose with a blood clot no surgery can reach. Charles Grant and a crew are injected into his body aboard a submarine shrunk to microscopic size.
- Netflix3.4/5
- IMDb6.8/1022,745 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes91%
Trailer
Plot summary
America and the Soviet Union can both shrink matter, but only for an hour. Dr. Jan Benes, a scientist who worked behind the Iron Curtain, has found a way to make the process last, and American agents bring him to New York. An attempt on his life leaves him comatose, with a clot in his brain that no surgeon can reach from outside. A Navy submarine, the Proteus, is reduced to microscopic size at the Combined Miniature Deterrent Forces facility. Captain Bill Owens, Dr. Michaels, Dr. Peter Duval, his assistant Cora Peterson and agent Charles Grant go aboard. Injected into Benes, they have sixty minutes to reach the clot, repair it and get out before the submarine returns to its normal size.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Fantastic Voyage (1966)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Bantam Books offered Isaac Asimov a flat $5,000 with no royalties to novelize the screenplay, and he initially refused, writing in his autobiography that he called it 'hackwork... beneath my dignity.'
SPOILER
Isaac Asimov pointed out that the film's ending has a real logical flaw, since the wrecked, miniaturized submarine left behind inside Dr. Benes would also grow back to full size and kill him; in his own novelization he fixed this by having the crew lure a white blood cell into dragging the wreckage out of the body first.- Raquel Welch landed her first Fox contract for this film after being spotted in a beauty contest by producer Saul David's wife.
- The Proteus submarine was built as a full-size set piece 42 feet long, first seen in the "miniaturizer" room and later outside the lung and inside the inner ear, where the cast appeared to be swimming outside it while actually suspended by wires.
- James Cameron said of his long-planned Fantastic Voyage remake in April 2024, "we plan to go ahead with it very soon", and in December 2025 he noted that there was a new script in the works with a new director.
