Fantastic Voyage

Perhaps because the original is one of the first sci-fi films I ever saw in a theater it's always been a sentimental favorite. God knows it's a bit cheesy, but any flick with Raquel Welch in tight-fitting scuba gear can't be all bad...

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And then there's Harper Goff's Proteus, one of the coolest sci-fi vehicles to ever grace the screen IMO...

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James Cameron being James Cameron I'd be very interested in seeing his take on the concept, but I'm certainly not holding my breath. Rumors of a FV remake have been swirling around for ages, but so far as I know they have no basis in fact.
 
FV is, by far, one of my all-time favorite films. Flaws and all, I love it.

I'm open to the idea of a remake (why not..? They're remaking everything else). However, I'll always love the original.
 
Are we going to get kids that wanna commit suicide because they wanna be reborn into this world aswell ?
 
Without Welch, without Pleasence... ho hum. It's like the Barbarella remake. No Fonda, no Pallenberg, no point. The total essence of Barbarella is it's a 60s period-piece - a fun, effervescent expression of the sexual revolution. Lotsa luck trying to repeat that, remakers. Especially given the clueless handling of tone which is the bane of modern Hollywood. And actually, it is that, the current inability of Hollywood to craft tone, which makes every remake announcement so dismaying.

Thanks, Carson Dyle, for the wonderful pictures.
 
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Looking again (and again and again) at the Raquel pics above, I feel moved to post once more.

A tip to remakers. Just don't even bother thinking about remaking 60s movies unless you're at least going to recreate the women's hair. '65-'75 : the greatest ten years in all history for women's hairstyles.

What the heck, let's brighten the board up a bit this grey January morning... three epic hairdos from hair's finest decade:
 
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As a HUGE fan of the original, I'm dubious about any remake, no matter who's in charge. And you can't improve on the original Proteus. Harper Goff's stuff is iconic, whether it's FV or the Nautilus.
 
Colin Droidmilk said:
Thanks, Carson Dyle, for the wonderful pictures.
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You’re entirely welcome.

Here are a few more publicity proofs for my fellow “Voyage” fans. I snagged these from a Hollywood Blvd. poster shop ages ago, and I’ve never them seen them re-printed anywhere else…

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racquel.png


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I agree that much of FV’s charm stems from its mid-century Cold War-era stylistic.

That said, trying to recreate that tone and/or style via some sort of retrograde rehash would be an exercise in futility. In terms of a remake, I trust filmmakers would keep the title and the general concept and toss everything else. Indeed, the only reason to mount a remake, so far as I can tell, would be to revisit the interior of the human body via modern SFX technology.

This may sound like sacrilege coming from a fan of the original film, but it’s precisely because I am a fan that I want no part of any remake seeking to artificially recreate a 60’s vibe for modern audiences (talk about a doomed mission).

Cameron is pretty adept at "world building," and it would be interesting to see what sort of voyage he'd envision (I'm speaking from a purely visual standpoint here). My strong suspicion is that we'll never know, and as far as fans of the original film are concerned it's probably just as well.
 
Amazing pictures, thanks again!

You're right of course that recreating a 60s tone would be pointless, but apart from that irrational cry from the heart about hairstyles, that wasn't really what I was saying about tone. What I meant was that 'tone maintenance' was better in the old days, and that the remakes only highlight Hollywood's present feebleness in this department, by inviting comparison to better-handled originals.

And Cameron has got some bad tone-offences under his belt - such as the ludicrously out-of-place gun-and-chase melodrama between DiCaprio and the villain while the Titanic sinks. It's as though Cameron suddenly thought the sinking of the Titanic - the central subject and sole raison d'etre of his film - wasn't dramatic enough, so he asks you to forget about it for minutes on end while his hero and villain run about the ship like they're in some silent whacky 20s melodrama, practically oblivious to the disaster around them. That's tone crime. It's why that film, FX aside, is not fit to lick the boots of 'A Night to Remember'.

It's always worse when the film is a remake, because one misses the superior tone handling of the original. Wasn't always so. Older remakes such as 'Invasion of the Body-Snatchers' and 'The Thing' exhibit perfect tone control. They were tonally solid, competent updates on the originals. Experience has shown us that we cannot look forward to that in today's remakes.
 
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Colin Droidmilk said:
It's as though Cameron suddenly thought the sinking of the Titanic - the central subject and sole raison d'etre of his film - wasn't dramatic enough, so he asks you to forget about it for minutes on end while his hero and villain run about the ship like they're in some silent whacky 20s melodrama
Click to expand...

Titanic is essentially an Irwin Allen disaster epic, as were both The Abyss and True Lies. All three pictures are, at heart, domestic melodramas, albeit very expensively mounted and elaborately staged ones.

As a life long Irwin Allen fan I have no problem with Hollywood Spectacle over substance if the spectacle is handled as adroitly as Allen and Cameron have done.

My issue with Titanic is that (unlike, say, The Poseidon Adventure) the events depicted are based on historical tragedy. If nothing else I wish Cameron had hired Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (Merchant-Ivory’s favorite scenarist) to take a polish pass on the dialogue. I mean, I have no idea what Molly Brown actually said as she watched the Titanic slip beneath the surface, but I’m almost positive she didn’t rip off Bill Murray’s “There’s something you don’t see everyday” line from Ghostbusters.

In any case, your remarks re: tone are well founded. For example, I firmly believe the biggest problem with the Star Wars prequel trilogy is a relentlessly somber tone that is incompatible with the OT’s effortless Saturday Matinee-style goofiness. Star Wars is at its best when we sense Lucas isn’t taking himself, his material, or his audience too seriously. The problem with Titanic is that Cameron doesn’t take these things seriously enough.

But, as usual, I digress…


:)
 
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It will be hard to top the uber hot Raquel Welch, or the awesomeness that was the Proteus for sure. I'll give Cameron the benefit of the doubt though. I'm sure he'll produce something, at least visually appealing:thumbsup
 
Carson Dyle said:
Titanic is essentially an Irwin Allen disaster epic, as were both The Abyss and True Lies. All three pictures are, at heart, domestic melodramas, albeit very expensively mounted and elaborately staged ones.

As a life long Irwin Allen fan I have no problem with Hollywood Spectacle over substance if the spectacle is handled as adroitly as Allen and Cameron have done.

My issue with Titanic is that (unlike, say, The Poseidon Adventure) the events depicted are based on historical tragedy. If nothing else I wish Cameron had hired Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (Merchant-Ivory’s favorite scenarist) to take a polish pass on the dialogue. I mean, I have no idea what Molly Brown actually said as she watched the Titanic slip beneath the surface, but I’m almost positive she didn’t rip off Bill Murray’s “There’s something you don’t see everyday” line from Ghostbusters.

In any case, your remarks re: tone are well founded. For example, I firmly believe the biggest problem with the Star Wars prequel trilogy is a relentlessly somber tone that is incompatible with the OT’s effortless Saturday Matinee-style goofiness. Star Wars is at its best when we sense Lucas isn’t taking himself, his material, or his audience too seriously. The problem with Titanic is that Cameron doesn’t take these things seriously enough.

But, as usual, I digress…


:)
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Digress away - it's a nice conversation. In films like Poseidon Adventure and Towering Inferno, the melodrama and disaster were married seamlessly; they all had imacculate tone. It's something you could practically take for granted in the past. Films may have been flawed - even terrible - in other ways, but one never encountered so often this sense of stuff sticking out like a cow's backside - such as that line from 'Titanic' you mentioned.

One of the unsung directorial achievements of Star Wars I think, is that it managed such a perfectly consistent tone while embracing so many disparate genre components. The fact that we're utterly seduced by Han Solo instead of laughing in disbelief as he does that slow gunslinger walk out of the cantina, hands by his sides, is because we're in the hands of a master tone builder. The fact that we buy any of it is down to the mastery of tone Lucas was capable of back then. It's why Star Wars has more in common with Graffiti and THX1138 than it has with the prequels.

But Fantastic Voyage. Last time I saw it I was struck by the extensive use they made of the exterior full-size Proteus, moving the thing around with the actors sitting in it. Barbarella too, had a lot of that. Shifting full-size vehicles about with actors sitting in them...
 
Colin Droidmilk said:
Films may have been flawed - even terrible - in other ways, but one never encountered so often this sense of stuff sticking out like a cow's backside - such as that line from 'Titanic' you mentioned.
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As specialized technical ability has supplanted rich life experience in terms of what directors bring to the storytelling party, Hollywood films have become increasingly self-aware, anachronistic, and “postmodern.” This is especially noticeable in historical epics, in which the legions of Agamemnon are virtually indistinguishable from the legions of Saladin even though the events depicted in “Troy” occur two thousand years before those of “Kingdom of Heaven.” Fortunately for the filmmakers, audiences are so dumb they can’t tell the difference.

Tone-wise, films are much more fragile things than some folks realize; one false note can screw up an entire movie. Fantastic Voyage, although an admittedly cheesy film, at least does us the courtesy of being uniformly and consistently cheesy.

Colin Droidmilk said:
But Fantastic Voyage. Last time I saw it I was struck by the extensive use they made of the exterior full-size Proteus, moving the thing around with the actors sitting in it. Barbarella too, had a lot of that. Shifting full-size vehicles about with actors sitting in them...
Click to expand...

Yeah, I have a shot somewhere of the full-scale Proteus mounted to an elaborate gimbal. I would love to have seen that set in person.

I’ve been a Proteus fan for decades; as mentioned above, it’s probably my all-time favorite sci-fi vehicle.

Rumor has long held that the full-scale Proteus was subsequently retro-fitted to appear as a “rescue sub” in The Poseidon Adventure...

http://www.cloudster.com/sets&vehicles/Proteus/ProteusMockupIndex.htm

As it happens, I recently had a chance to speak to (Poseidon Adventure production designer) Bill Creber, who discounted the rumor, asserting that no re-fit Proteus played any part whatsoever in the Poseidon Adventure. Further, he assured me that had the suggestion ever arisen he would have “had a problem with it” because he "hates the (*$%!ing) Proteus."

Asked to elaborate, Creber recounted how his friend and colleague, the late (Fantastic Voyage) art director Dale Hennessy, had designed "a really beautiful, cool-looking Proteus" for the movie (see rendering below) but director Richard Fleischer insisted on bringing his old pal Harper Goff aboard to handle the Proteus design chores instead.

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Apparently Hennessy was crushed by the decision, and after all these years his friend Creber still harbors a certain resentment -- hence his anti-Proteus bias. For the record, Creber did not attack Goff nor Goff's design per se; merely the way in which the design came into being.

I realize this has ****-all to do with the alleged James Cameron version of Fantastic Voyage, but I thought fans of the original FV might nevertheless get a kick out of the story.
 
Do we really need to carry on taking classic movies and chucking as much CGI at them as possible ? probably 3D it too i suppose cos 3D is the new kick now isn't it. :unsure
 
defstartrooper said:
Do we really need to carry on taking classic movies and chucking as much CGI at them as possible ? probably 3D it too i suppose cos 3D is the new kick now isn't it. :unsure
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I know... And actually, poor old cgi. The technology is fast becoming a dirty word because of the lame use Hollywood is putting it to. A shame because there's a million other uses cgi could be put to in the wider art world.
 
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