Guillermo del Toro’s Fantastic Voyage remake to start filming in 2018.

Next year. …First off: wow.  It’s 2017! I forget that we’re in the future now, sometimes.  All of the books that I read as a kid liked this time period for near-future stories — and not a one of ’em got it right.  Less space travel, hella better computers. Seriously, I think that we have better ones than the ones on Star Trek: TOS*.

Second: Fantastic Voyage is an interesting choice, no?  For those that don’t know: Isaac Asimov wrote the novelization of the movie, then wrote Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brain twenty years later because dear God but the science in said movie, and by then everybody thought that it was his fault. Which leads to the question: which version does del Toro want to do?

Third: all three versions have a certain Cold War sensibility about them. Which is to say: the movie and novelization are spy thrillers, complete with dastardly Soviet assassins, while Asimov’s sequel assumes that the Soviets are still around in the 21st Century, only they’re no longer doing that world conquest thing and everything’s kind of OK**. …What’s del Toro going to substitute for that?  Anybody else, I’d just assume the usual stupid ‘evil corporation’ nonsense, but I expect more from this particular director. I’d kind of like to see it done as a period piece: set it in the 1960s, and all that.  You’d have to explain away why we didn’t miniaturize everything afterwards, but what the heck.

So I guess, with all this interest in this film on my part, I’ll probably go see it. Two years from now.

Moe Lane

*Except for the crazy AIs, of course. And thank goodness for that.

**This was, bizarrely enough, an optimistic view for science fiction in that era.  Hard to believe it, but up until 1987 or so it was considered ridiculous to think that we were actually going to win the Cold War.