I went into this expecting 50s sci-fi cheese and ended up with a side order of metaphysics.
Scott Carey (Grant Williams) gets exposed to a weird radioactive cloud while on vacation with his wife Louise (Randy Stuart). That cloud triggers a weird biochemical reaction in Scott such that he starts…well, shrinking. First his pants start feeling looser, then he notices he’s shorter and lost several pounds. Doctors are stumped; the most they can do is slow the rate of Scott’s illness. Gradually he shrinks to the size of a child, then a doll, and then an insect, with each change in size bringing on new dangers and new challenges.
So that was the bit I knew about. I knew there would be a scene where the family housecat chased him, and that I’d get to see some slightly dippy special effects and scenes with Grant Williams fighting a rubber spider or something while wielding a comedically-oversized sewing needle as a sword. To be fair, too, for 1950s technology the special effects weren’t bad – there were a few instances of forced perspective illusions, like they used in some Lord Of The Rings scenes, and any scene where Scott is interacting alone with his larger world just scales up everything. Only a couple bits where footage of a tiny Scott superimposed on a scene with larger people seemed creaky and fuzzy, and I actually wonder if I’d have even noticed if I hadn’t been watching on a big-ass 21st Century TV.
The thing is, I was expecting the plot to be similarly cheesy, with a plethora of hair-raising escapes and Scott MacGuyvering himself weapons out of paper clips and thread – capped off by a last-minute medical breakthrough which allows Scott to start growing again. I got some of that – but I got a lot more philosophical musing from Scott as he struggles to adjust to his new reality. His marriage to Louise suffers – Scott just feels weird around her when he’s only up to her waist – and for a time he contemplates an affair with a little person working at the local sideshow, until his disease progresses and he turns even smaller. His narration for the battle with the spider is all about his war with the spider for food (a piece of stale cake that Louise absent-mindedly left behind). And at the very end, right when it seems certain that Scott is going to continue to shrink away to nothing, he has a lengthy epiphany about his ultimate place in the order of the universe, and things get….Zen.
When I learned that this was based on a work by Richard Matheson, the metaphysical bent made total sense. Matheson’s written several novels and short stories – some sci-fi, some not – which examine some fairly deep questions about fate, time, and the natural world, and Mankind’s relationship to all. He’s probably best known for I Am Legend – which has a very, very different ending than one it got in the 2008 movie adaptation starring Will Smith. That film is about the survivor of a plague which has turned everyone else into vampire-like creatures, but he’s ultimately discovered a vaccine and sends it to a distant small town where other survivors are holed up in safety, ready to start fighting back. But in Matheson’s book, our survivor ultimately realizes that these vampires have a great deal of “humanity” to them, and are now the dominant species, and he has now become their boogieman after a years-long campaign of trying to fight them off.
Matheson deals in the kind of heady sci-fi which is actually my jam. What threw me, though, was seeing that coming after the kind of special effects I associate with…less intellectual works. It knocked me for a loop immediately after watching – but after digesting things a little, I almost want to watch it again.
The Movie Crash Course 