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September 28, 2004
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea
Last week I got the double sided DVD from netflix with both Fantastic Voyage and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea on it. I got it without knowing the second film was on it and had only wanted to see Fantasitic Voyage because I always liked the parts of it I had seen before, but had never seen it all the way through. I had read the book too, which was written by Isaac Asimov and which tried to answer all the pesky scientific problems about miniaturization that you start to think of when you shrink a submarine full of scientists and insert it into the bloodstream of another scientist. Fantastic Voyage is a pretty good sixties sci-fi film staring Rachel Welch in a tight outfit and a bunch of other people I had not heard of. The book tried to take care of a lot of unspoken problems of the film. My favorite was at the end when the submarine and its crew are about to automatically rebigulate (thank you Dr. Frink). In the book they all come out the scientist’s tear duct. No problem. However, in the movie the submarine and the one traitorous scientist are left lodged in the scientist’s brain. What happens when they rebigulate? The movie ends as this should be happening but does not show you what happens. Do they simply not rebigulate because they are being attacked by antibodies or if they do rebigulate, do they cause the scientists head to explode and crush the doctors and nurses surrounding him thus making the entire mission a failure?
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea does not stand the test of time well and is interesting for other reasons. The basic plot is this: some U.S. Admiral/Scientist played by Walter Pidgeon has designed the greatest submarine ever, which is a combination of an underwater cruise ship, a research vessel, and a nuclear missile launching sub and it ends up saving the world. I have never been on a real sub, but all of the pictures and movies about them I have seen make them look very cramped. This sub has a huge interior, with officers having huge private offices that look larger than what their land based counterparts probably have. And there are rooms that look to be a thousand square feet or so large that for the most are not used and have no crew regularly in them. Then there is the research lab which has Peter Lorre, one of my favorite actors, playing the worlds greatest physicist, who also happens to be a great marine biologist and who has a shark tank on board the sub. The tank is on the way from the main part of the sub to the nuclear reactor section and you have to cross over it to get from one end to the other. And it does not have good handrails. You know someone is going to get eaten by the shark while going to or from the nuclear reactor at some point in the movie and you are not disappointed in this belief. They also hand everyone radiation detection badges so you know someone will overdose on radiation as well. It turns out its one person who overdoses on radiation and then falls into the shark tank. Does this hurt the shark? The other two notable crew members are Franky Avalon who is an officer and sings the title music and Barbara Eden (I Dream of Jeanie) who plays the Admiral’s secretary/Franky Avalons love interest.
The rest of the plot is where it starts to get interesting. On the ships first real voyage it is going under the North Pole when all of sudden ice chunks start falling on it. Ignore the fact that ice floats and there is no reason why it should be falling through the water because it is melting. They surface to discover that the Van Allen Radiation Belt has gone all wacky and for some unexplained reason is superheating the Earth. The average temperature surface temperature is hitting the 150's and is rising so our heroes go to the UN to present their plan to nuke the Van Allen Belt into submission. Some French and German/Austrian scientists (no one has name tags like at the real UN) say that we should just surrender to the Van Allen Belt and it will eventually tucker itself out. The UN delegates agree with France and Germany and decide to surrender at which point the Admiral says that he only answers to the president and walks out of the meeting to his giant submarine waiting just outside UN headquarters. Even though the temperatures are now supposed to be in the 150's and getting warmer, the admiral shows no ill effects from walking outside across the concrete path to the sub, the UNs fountains are all still on even though at this point water would be rare, and the U.S. soldiers who for some reason chase after him are still in dark, long sleeve uniforms. They then set about going underneath the water around South America because they have to get to the Mariana Trench to launch the missile at the right angle at the right time and they can not contact Washington to get permission to launch the missile or use the Panama Canal. They are attacked by a giant octopus at one point and have to navigate mine fields and of course dive to great depths to avoid an enemy sub sent to destroy them. And there are saboteurs on the sub who want to surrender to the Van Allen Belt as well. This is just not the Admirals week.
Of course they eventually nuke the Van Allen Belt into submission (U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!) and thus save the world from being cooked. At which point in real life the Kofi Annan would call the unilateral preemptive action by the admiral illegal because Annan was taking kickbacks from the belt and the General Assembly would pass a resolution condemning Israel and blaming it for any negative consequences that occurred because of the nuke.
For some reason this post makes me feel all Lileksy.
Posted by Pete at September 28, 2004 11:38 AM
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