Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea

Ever wonder where "Star Trek" and all the other Sci-Fi series got there starts?

I used to watch the series as a kid back when the UK only had 3 television channels, and they were offline more than online back in the 1960s when this was the State-Of-The-Art.

Now, over 40 years after it was made and most of the cast are either dead or retired, this movie is still standing the test of Time.

The plot is a little silly, with glaring holes that submarines could be driven through, and the acting is a little on the hammy-side sometimes, but for an entertaining look at how movie-makers in the 50s/60s thought the future might look, this is an excellent peek into how Hollywood was thinking at the time.

The cast seem to mesh well together around stilted dialogue ("Military Police swim like fish - it's part of their training"), and the prodigious talents of the likes of Joan Fontaine and Peter Lorre are somewhat reined-in, but overall this movie is still great to watch over four decades after they made it.

I have been a huge fan of Irwin Allen's TV show "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea" for over 45 years now, and have come to regard it as "Star Trek" underwater. (Actually, since "Voyage" preceded Capt. Kirk & Co. by two years, it might be fairer to regard "Star Trek" as "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea" in outer space!) Somehow, however, I had never watched Allen's original 1961 film on which the television program was based...until last night, that is. Now I realize that the film works as a nice introduction to the superior series, and that even though it avoids the silliness that would be the hallmark of the TV incarnation's Season 4, it still remains a strangely corny sci-fi outing. Fortunately, it also features a top-notch cast and better-than-adequate FX; how impressive they must have looked on the 1961 CinemaScope screen! During the course of the film, Adm. Nelson races his new atomic sub, the Seaview, halfway across the world to a spot in the Pacific, where he hopes to shoot a rocket at (and thus extinguish) the suddenly blazing Van Allen belt that is threatening all life on Earth. En route, Nelson and crew face what is by now a familiar roster of "Voyage to" problems: minefields, sea monsters, sabotage attempts, an attacking sub and squabbling amongst themselves. It's all great fun for both young and old alike, but well done as it all is, I kept finding myself yearning for the familiar cast and crew that I'd grown to love by dint of watching those 110 TV episodes over and over again for decades. Walter Pidgeon and Robert Sterling just don't seem as likable to me as Richard Basehart and David Hedison in the Adm. Nelson and Capt. Crane roles. Also, I find Frankie Avalon's title song here sappy and inappropriate, the saboteur's motivations dubious, and the film's conclusion way too abrupt. Nice to see Del Monroe on board, though, with his Kowalski character (here, in this early incarnation, called Kowski). Oh...one of the film's stars, Barbara Eden, gives a very interesting interview on the "Voyage to" DVD, and even four decades later, still looks fantastic; she must have asked for the gift of eternal beauty from a genie in a bottle somewhere....

A fantastic submarine encounters dangers.

Voyage is a sci-fic movie, a disaster movie about a fire, an end-of-the-world movie, a movie with striking sets/miniature effects, and finally, the very first Irwin show to highlight the need of a top (and loud) musical score, thanks to composer Paul Sawtell.

This epic begins with Frankie Avalon singing - "Come with me, come with me, on a Voyage, to the Bottom, of the Sea" - and this totally under-rated song (it compares with the best of Sinatra!) should have been re-used in the Voyage/Sea TV series...as everything else in this picture was lifted into the series.

Shortly after, the film then moves into Admiral Nelson giving us a tour of the submarine Seaview, which resembles the opening minutes of the Irwin Allen directed Time Tunnel pilot (1966) when we were also given a Tunnel complex tour.

The Paul Sawtell scored footage of the icebergs pounding on the Seaview and the footage of the Seaview surfacing in a red sea would rank as some of the most striking bits of footage in Irwin's long history of film/TV making! Outstanding!

The cast of this motion picture is fine but I know this cast from other quality productions (Forbidden Planet, I Dream Of Jeannie) and am not all together comfortable seeing this cast on the Seaview. Give me Richard Basehart (and the flying sub!).

Some fans will put down this film because it features no Richard Basehart or David Hedison, but remember this, without this film there would have been no Voyage/Sea (1964-68) TV series. That is recorded fact! The budget for all of these sets, props and effects was HUGE, too huge for a TV series of the 1960s. The series happened because it could lift everything from the film.

One of my very favourite movies ever!

This film was a good science fiction film for the era it was made in. I know a lot of people talk about the fact that it has a lot of scientific inaccuracies, but I prefer to take it for what it is, a great adventure film. Also, the characters may be stock but I like them for what they are. This definitely is a good way to spend a Saturday afternoon.

I still remember seeing this film at movie theaters way back when I was a lad. Of course I didn't hear very much of it due to all the shrieks and squeals from the teenage girls in the audience over Frankie Avalon. That curiously enough didn't matter because Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea is a very visual film.

It might seem a little old hat today, but we've been through two more generations that have seen the United States Navy become an atomic fleet of submarines and surface carriers. It was only seven years earlier, in 1955 that the U.S.S. Nautilus was launched as our first atomic submarine. In homage to that wonderful visionary Jules Verne who foresaw atomic power one hundred years earlier the Navy named it after that famous undersea ship of Verne's great novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. The nuclear submarine was a wondrous thing in 1961.

The idea of a nuclear power submarine was the brainchild of Admiral Hyman Rickover. Rickover was a tough minded s.o.b. who usually got whatever he wanted by any mean necessary including bullying. Hard to believe that the gentlemanly Walter Pigeon could play him, but he did and well as Admiral Harry Nelson, the ersatz Rickover.

What's happened here is that the Van Allen radiation belt that surrounds the Earth has caught fire and temperatures are climbing all over the world. The planet is doomed, but Walter Pigeon's got an idea to save it. Fire a missile and seed the belt with more radiation, kind of a nuclear backfire and the blaze will end.

A lot of people are telling him it won't work, but Pigeon brushes them all aside. The only two who have faith in him are his assistants played by Peter Lorre and Barbara Eden. But our intrepid admiral pushes through.

Of course the U.S.S. Seaview encounters all kinds of obstacles along the way, but that's the rest of the story.

The cast does very well for itself and young Frankie Avalon as a junior officer comes off rather nicely. Frankie sings over the title credits, but during the movie plays a trumpet. Avalon in fact was a trumpet virtuoso and a singing career was an afterthought. The fickle finger of fate.

Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea still a nice science fiction adventure even though it is dated.