Innerspace(1987)/Dir:Joe Dante, Screenplay:Jeffrey Boam and Chip Proser
Well, I was pretty much stuck doing some plaster scrapping in my own hall, when I had in my ears every possible Stevie Nicks song blaring away through my IPod : Stand Back, Landslide, Edge of Seventeen, Talk to Me, I Can’t Wait , Gold Dust Woman, Crash into Me. If I wasn’t listening to some music, it would have made scrapping my wall from stuckout and plaster, completely unbearable, and filled with insufferable tedium. For a good thing, I wasn’t already sweating buckets, but just a lot from my forehead. My roomate handed me a small handkierchef to tie over my nose and mouth, while thanking her, I was almost finishing one section of my hall and decided to call it quits for today. On Sunday, I’ll be doing the stucco around the door frame.
Which would only bring us to my review of Innerspace, another Joe Dante sci-fi classic since The Howling that I last reviewed, and made more of a recommendation than a complete review. Innerspace, is a lot like another science-fiction made by Richard Fleischer in the sixties, called The Fantastic Voyage, but in Dante’s version, the plot is more inventive. In The Fantastic Voyage, a group of scientists get small by “miniaturization” as they call it in this universe, and to be injected into the body of an ailing Major, through a spaceship-looking submarine. In Innerspace on the other hand, a test pilot named Tuck Pendleton (Dennis Quaid) has the experiment of being miniaturized in a pod submersible, and to be injected in a seringue into the body of a rabbit. And yet, that’s where things supposedly get good, because Tuck isn’t injected into the rabbit as planned, but in the body of a nervous overworked wimpy grocery clerk, Jack Putter (Martin Short). Why is that ? Rival scientists invade the lab by breaching the security while Tuck is being transformed small, leaving a sole scientist Ozzie to escape with the seringue with Tuck being microscopic in it. In his escape, ridding frantically on a bicycle lands in a nearby shopping mall, and meets Jack Putter in his race, Ozzie jabs Jack with the seringue in his buttocks. Tuck is right now inside of Jack ! Afterwards, it’s a race against time to get the microchips capable of turning back Tuck to normal from the rival scientists, who are played deliciously by Kevin McCarthy and Fiona Lewis, as the shrewd and elitist Victor Scrimshaw and lustfull redhead Margaret Canker.
Amazing story, isn’t it ? Even to this day, it still packs a punch with it’s unique premise. In a way, it does surpass The Fantastic Voyage, with numerous elements of surprise in it’s own plotline. It’s a very good, and very thrilling sci-fi action flick which makes it perfect for a textbook definition of a popcorn film. The kind of film that is simply made for pure mindless enjoyable fun, like the perfect James Bond film. The dialogue even written by two screenwriters, is often putrid and sharp at moments. It’s only conversationally written. Jeffrey Boam would go on to screenwrite since this film, the third part in the Indiana Jones trilogy, Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade.
Joe Dante assures an impeccable direction, as you’d might expect from him, being one of his films in which he is in top form. Well then again, if the film has two of Spielberg’s producers, such as Kathleen Kenney and Frank Marshall, along with Spielberg himself, the direction is guaranteed to be extraordinary.
About the Special Effects, they’re absolutely astonishing, and they make everything seem more believable than today’s CGI filled-to-the-rim films, making them look either plastically or artificially fake. That’s the marvelous about these effects, is that they’re so well-made, and you don’t seem them as effects for it’s direction, but you see them as Jack’s insides and organs. Why not today, make a film with these kinds of effects and lay off the CGI for a while, without oversaturating everything, because it’s more practical. A movie with way too much CGI in it, seems lazily done to me.
Let’s go to the acting, Martin Short and Dennis Quaid give out comparable performances, in the simple mesure, that they don’t try to outdo or overact one another. However, their performances happen to be amazing, despite the fact that they never occupy the same room simply because of an impossible situation where Quaid is inside of Short. It’s only amazing, because acting like this is extraordinairely difficult. There is no palpable chemistry because we don’t see them how they are in the same space, but at a huge distance. If it was any actor, instead of Quaid and Short, the film would have failed monumentally, because Short can at least carry this film. It’s been a very, very long time, that I haven’t seen Martin Short in a leading predominant role, even for a comedian, he’d be acting in the role of a confused psychopath, or a discreet serial killer. Instead of comedy, which incarnates for him as his own comfort zone, why doesn’t he do
drama ? Short tries to be funny through characters like Jiminy Glick, and he’s absolutely hysterical. If it was himself, the comedy does seem forced and stale. I never seen him in a drama, that’s why he’d be good in a drama. Nevertheless, it would be refreshing. Meg Ryan delivers a plucky and nonchalant performance as Quaid’s love interest, being the reporter who investigates the break-in of the lab.
You’ll have to be content with Innerspace for the time being.
4.2*/5
M.L
Nov 26th 2011
