Back Inside INNERSPACE, Joe Dante’s Fantastic Voyage

Stop me if you’ve heard this idea for a movie: Dean Martin gets miniaturized and injected into the body of Jerry Lewis.

That’s the pitch for Joe Dante’s 1987 film Innerspace, his last collaboration with producer Steven Spielberg until making Small Soldiers for DreamWorks in 1998. Made between his contributions to the outrageous 1986 anthology comedy Amazon Women on the Moon and his darkly comic 1989 movie The ’Burbs, Innerspace could be considered Joe Dante’s most commercial film. Not only did it carry the Spielberg brand, it was also cast with big stars (Dennis Quaid, Martin Short, and Meg Ryan) and boasted impressive, state-of-the-art special effects and a high concept that was sure to bring people out to the theater. And yet, for some reason, the movie was something of a box office disappointment when it was released in the summer of 1987; though the film’s final budget is difficult to pin down, it wound up grossing only $25 million domestically—roughly one-sixth the take of Dante’s Gremlins, released three years earlier.

Luckily, Innerspace found life on VHS and cable TV and has since gone on to become something of a classic, and deservedly so. It represents the period of Joe Dante’s career in which he was able to accomplish the impressive feat of making movies that are broadly commercial without sacrificing his own idiosyncratic voice—for as much as Innerspace is a crowd-pleasing special effects comedy, it remains a Joe Dante movie through and through. He finds roles both large and small for members of his repertory company: Kevin McCarthy, Robert Picardo, William Schallert, Henry Gibson, Archie Hahn, Wendy Schaal and, of course, the great Dick Miller.

A lifelong lover of Warner Bros. animation, Dante slips in references to classic cartoons throughout the movie, whether it’s the Tasmanian Devil sound effect that plays as the pod carrying pilot Tuck Pendleton (Quaid) is miniaturized or a cameo by animator Chuck Jones. There are references to old science fiction movies, including 1966’s Fantastic Voyage, the clear inspiration for Innerspace in which a crew of scientists are shrunken down and injected into a human body. Like with so many of his movies, Dante finds ways to squeeze in all of the things he loves.

The special genius of Joe Dante is that his movies deliver everything you want from their respective premises while subverting everything you expect. Gremlins offers a veritable army of the titular creatures wreaking havoc, just as its title implies, but it does so within the confines of a movie that lays waste to idyllic iconography of small towns in American film and turns everything we know about Christmas into something dark and sinister. The Howling has really cool werewolves and groundbreaking transformation scenes, but they appear inside the framework of a monster movie in which the monsters are wracked with guilt and self-doubt—a black comedy spoof on the self-help New Age movement of the early 1980s.

With Innerspace, Dante delivers what we want from a blockbuster chiefly in the form of the movie’s cutting-edge, Academy Award-winning visual effects (this is the only Dante movie to ever win an Oscar) courtesy of Dennis Muren and the fizzy mixture of comedy, adventure and lighthearted science fiction. Some of that commercialism can possibly be attributed to producer Spielberg, who knows his way around this kind of four-quadrant film. With those elements firmly in place, however, Joe Dante is free to be Joe Dante, scribbling in the margins with his usual anarchic silliness and references, bucking convention whenever possible. This is a movie in which the traditional action hero is stuffed into a claustrophobic pod for the entirety of the film, practically unable to move, while the chases and fistfights are given over to a diminutive former SCTV actor (Short).

The climax of the film finds one of the bad guys (Vernon Wells) being dissolved in stomach acid—the closest Dante comes in Innerspace to his horror movie roots—and the others being shrunk down to 50% of their original size, but still trying to bite and claw their way to a win like the little kids they now resemble. Then there is Robert Picardo as “The Cowboy”, a curly-haired, tan-skinned criminal of unknown descent and a character so silly and odd that it feels like a performance calibrated specifically to make everyone laugh on set.

But even beyond the very cool visual effects depicting the inside of the human body as an otherworldly sci-fi landscape and the silly streak that runs through the film, Innerspace is working from a strong script by Chip Proser (whose original vision was reportedly darker) and Jeffrey Boam. The character arcs are well-written: drunken, reckless Tuck (Quaid) learns to grow up and be responsible, while timid hypochondriac Jack Putter (a very funny Martin Short) finds his courage and becomes heroic. The partnership between the two eventually gives way to friendship and mutual respect founded under the least conventional of circumstances: one man living inside the other. There’s a very sweet romantic side of the film, too, as Tuck attempts to communicate his feelings for ex-girlfriend Lydia (Meg Ryan, with whom Dennis Quaid began a real-life romance during the film and eventually married) through Jack, who himself also falls for Lydia. Because it’s Meg Ryan, you can’t blame the guy. The movie has enough of a narrative spine holding it up that Dante can drape all of his unusual personal touches on it and the thing will still stand. No small feat, that.

The way Dante marries these two disparate halves—the traditional and the absurd—is his greatest accomplishment with Innerspace. It is a film that serves both lifelong Joe Dante aficionados such as myself, as well as the casual moviegoer just looking for something imaginative and entertaining. Dante was working at the peak of his powers with the full budget and resources of a major studio behind him, and the result is the kind of special movie that’s harder to achieve in today’s cinematic climate: a big-budget blockbuster that retains the authorial voice of a true auteur. For genre fans raised on Amblin films and Roger Corman drive-in pictures, Joe Dante embodies everything that we love about movies. He is a very special filmmaker, and Innerspace is among his most special films.