Genre: Sci-fi
Premise: A submarine and its crew are shrunken down to microscopic size and injected into the bloodstream of a woman in order to save her.
About: The original Fantastic Voyage came out in the 60s, and since everything must be remade, they’ve been trying to get this project going for a couple decades now. The good news is they have the firepower that is James Cameron behind it (as producer), although he’s so wrapped up in his Avatar universe, I’m not sure how much time he’s able to give. Sean Levy (helmer of the underrated “Real Steel”) was listed as director as late as two years ago, but there hasn’t been a lot of news on the project since, so it’s unclear if he’s still involved. The draft I’m reviewing is an old one (from 2006) since it is from a couple of my favorite writers, Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver. I really wanted to see what they did with the idea.
Writers: Screenplay by Harry Kleiner – current revisions by Rick Jaffa & Amanda Silver
Details: April 28, 2006 draft
I am a huge fan of Amanda Silver and Rick Jaffa. Listening to their interview on Jeff Goldsmith’s podcast shows you just how dedicated they are and how well they understand this craft. Particularly hearing how they won over 20th Century Fox with their take on Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which I believe to be one of the biggest risks a studio has ever taken. They made a silent movie. A SILENT MOVIE, where the main character is an animal and doesn’t speak. It’s NUTS. Anyone who could make that work, I’m willing to trust them with anything.
I profess to not knowing much about Fantastic Voyage other than the snippets I run into online every once in awhile, but if the last film came out in 1966 and I’m still hearing about it, there’s gotta be a story worth mining there, right? That’s not to say I don’t have concerns. Shrinking people down and sending them inside a human body has a bit of a kitschy dated feel to it. I’m sure that’s what all the development meetings come down to. How do we make this current? It’s a task I’d be terrified of as a writer. Which is why I’m so interested in Silver and Jaffa’s take. These guys have proven they know how to think outside the box and take chances. Let’s see if they did that here.
Megan Colby works at something called The Alliance Research Facility. The year is 2185. And there’s a lot of unrest in the world. For that reasons, everyone’s been implanted with a microscopic chip that tracks their whereabouts and can be remotely detonated if you’re a bad boy. Or, in Megan’s case, a bad girl. Which Megan very much is at the time we meet her.
She illegally sneaks out of the facility and meets up with some rebels who jam a resistor something-or-other into her neck that prevents the Alliance from remotely detonating her chip. The problem is, the chip is programmed to automatically detonate within six hours of no contact. So she’s not out of the woods yet.
We eventually learn that Megan has actually injected a second chip into her body, the Alliance’s new prototype chip that is going to change the way…. Well, I guess change the way they can execute people. That’s why she escaped the facility, to get this chip to the rebels. But therein lies the problem. These chips are INSIDE of her. Which begs the question: how do they get them out??
Enter Dr. Charles Grant, a handsome professor who used to be in love with Megan until she abruptly left him. Grant is an expert in the human body, which is why he’s recruited by the rebels to join them in their mission – miniaturize themselves inside a submarine, go inside Megan’s body, and retrieve the two chips.
They only have six hours before the chips explode, so they have to act fast. Megan is being kept in a coma in the meantime, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy. As Grant tells everyone, the human body has evolved over a million years to fight any foreign body that enters its system. Which is exactly what they are – a foreign body. Their task, he professes (remember, he’s a professor) is almost impossible. Little does Grant know, it’ll be more impossible than he thinks, as later he’ll find out… they’re not the only foreign body inside of Megan.
Reading this script is like reading one giant set of challenges. This is the kind of thing, if you break into his business, you’ll be tasked with figuring out. You have an idea that doesn’t quite work. What are you going to bring to the table to make it work? Fantastic Voyage’s problem, through no fault of any of the writers here, is a story that reads like something that could be tackled in an episode of a Saturday morning cartoon. A small submarine flying through the body. Oh no, watch out for the white blood cells!
It’s just not easy to give this the weight to stand toe to toe with all the other big movies out there. Damon Lindelof was recently interviewed about writing summer movies, and he pointed out that when you’re spending 150+ million on anything, the stakes have to be saving the world. That’s this draft of Voyage’s biggest problem. The only thing that really seems to be at stake here is this woman (the world is sorta at stake, but it’s unclear how).
Don’t get me wrong. That can work if we really love this woman and really want to see her and Grant get together in the end. But we barely know Megan (we only got to see her in that first scene) and we definitely don’t know her and Grant together outside of Grant mentioning it a few times, so we’re not emotionally invested in them getting to happily ever after.
The thing is, that’s the angle I would’ve taken too. There has to be an emotional attachment between the saver and the savee. But since we never saw that attachment, it’s hard to care. And this is a screenplay problem screenwriters all over the world face. How do you show that attachment without grinding the story to a halt? Do you start in the past, showing the two together? That means the script starts slow. Do you add flashbacks throughout? That’s hard to do without feeling on-the-nose and cheesy. So I sympathize with the writers here.
I will say that there’s on easy switch they could’ve done that would’ve made this way better. Megan can’t be asleep. She’s got to be in her own pressure-cooker of a situation while these guys are inside of her. That way, you have a dual-storyline going on. You jump inside her, they’re trying to defuse the chips, you jump out of her, she’s running from some people, or trying to accomplish her own mission (which might involve saving millions of people from the Alliance – now you have your “save the world” scenario). Having Megan in a coma the whole time was a missed opportunity.
The Fantastic Voyage script was also unique in that it was one the few times where I realized the world was beyond the realm of description. Well, maybe not beyond, but as these guys tried to describe the inside of the human body, it was overwhelming. And I was never quite sure what I was looking at. I just imagined a bunch of globbery red stuff with veins shooting everywhere. I rarely encounter that situation where the world is just so complex, it can only be shown onscreen (unless you want to write a book of description) and that hurt the read, because whenever we were chasing or being chased or going anywhere, I only had a vague visual sense of what was going on.
Finally, I think there was too much plot and not enough character development here. This is ANOTHER thing writers deal with when writing big-budget films. These films demand lots of plot and action to happen, so that’s where most of the focus goes. But we have to remember that if we don’t care about the characters, the plot doesn’t matter. The big issue here is that the most important relationship in the movie (Grant and Megan) isn’t even explored because there’s no way for them to communicate. And the rest of the characters were more “plot-mover” types. There to do shit, but not develop. I would’ve liked to have seen more development.
Fantastic Voyage is an idea fraught with challenges. I will say, though, that if James Cameron directed this, I would see it. Because you know he’d do two years of researching the human body and learning every single little thing there is to learn about it. Hell, he’d probably finish sequencing human DNA and wipe out a few cancers while he was at it. But the attention to detail he would give to this would make it worth watching. As far as THIS old draft of the script though, it wasn’t quite there. Which is probably why they’re still developing it.
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: As you make your way into this industry, you’re going to be asked to pitch your take on ideas a lot. I think it’s important to have a bold take when you walk into a pitch, an angle others haven’t thought of. That’s what Jaffa and Silver did with “Apes.” Everyone else was pitching the obvious versions of that story. They wanted to focus on one ape and his journey, even though he didn’t speak for 99% of the movie. That was bold. The take everyone has for Fantastic Voyage is pretty obvious and I think that’s what’s keeping it from becoming a hot project. This needs a hot take. What about you guys? What would your take be?
