Innerspace: Revisted
October 6, 2016 \ Movies \ 1 Comment
Innerspace revisited. In this series I re-watch a movie I haven’t seen in a long time to look at it with new eyes, and (hopefully) more experience. This time I revisit Innerspace.
I watched Innerspace when I was a kid and remember enjoying it. But my memory of it is so hazy I’ve been meaning to re-watch it for years.
Innerspace is about a washed up, drunken fighter pilot named Lt. Tuck Pendleton (Dennis Quaid) who participates in an experiment to shrink a submersible down to microscopic size (with Tuck in it). During the initial test, the lab is attacked by an organization who intends to steal the technology. The lead researcher escapes with the microscopic Tuck, and to protect him, injects Tuck into Jack Putter (Martin Short) a hypochondriac grocery clerk with cripplingly low self-confidence. Because Tuck’s initial test was meant to be brief, he only has twenty-four hours worth of air and the movie is a race for Tuck and Jack to work together to get Tuck back to normal size while avoiding the evil organization who is pursuing them.
The submersible has all this impressive technology, like the ability to automatically map the body’s pathways, sense location, emit electromagnetic pules and connect devices to the optic nerve and ear drums to see and hear what the subject sees and hears. What did these scientists intend to do with this technology? We never find out. I think the technology is really just a premise so we can get a movie with scenes like this:
Apparently Innerspace was originally written as a spy movie, but was re-written as a comedy when the film acquired director Joe Dante. The film still has elements of both genres, but it is a comedy first. Re-watching it revealed a lot of interesting an unexpected elements.
Here are six things I noticed when I revisited Innerspace.