The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957)
Directed by Jack Arnold
A dangerous combination of radiation and insecticide causes the unfortunate Scott Carey to shrink, slowly but surely, until he is only a few inches tall. His home becomes a wilderness where he must survive everything from spiders living in the cellar to his beloved cat.
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What critics compared The Incredible Shrinking Man to
…good, though not as remarkable as in the 1957 little person classic, “The Incredible Shrinking Man.”
From Attack of the 50-Foot Woman to The Incredible Shrinking Man, we can’t get enough of this concept.
There is a tiny bit of Swift here – or The Incredible Shrinking Man, or Ant-Man, or Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.
This is no The Incredible Shrinking Man or even Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, films which took this concept to a much more realized degree.
By way of such classics as “The Incredible Shrinking Man” (1957), the less well known 1940 mini-classic “Dr. Cyclops” and the Lilliputian episodes of Jonathan Swift’s 18th century masterpiece “Gulliver’s Travels,” “Downsizing” makes a serious attempt to be a “Gulliver’s Travels” for these times, a fantasy/science-fiction film with a Swiftian sense of purpose and political/social satire, and it works best on this level.
There’s something touching at the heart of this movie, just as there was in the thoughtful 50s sci-fi classic The Incredible Shrinking Man, which is that if we could stop thinking that we’re big in the universe, we might appreciate what has meaning within our cosmic insignificance.
I enjoyed the scenes in which Rudd first tries to function in a world of giant household objects, but only because they reminded me of The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957).
At the end of the day, frankly, any film that references The Incredible Shrinking Man so beautifully deserves its moment on the stage.
The rest of the movie, with simulated direction from a mixing-lab keyboard by somebody called Peyton Reed, is a series of stunts borrowed from such sci-fi classics as The Incredible Shrinking Man and The Fly.
It seems a pity, though, that the screenplay didn’t have the guts to emulate the wonderfully ethereal close of its real progenitor, Jack Arnold’s “The Incredible Shrinking Man” (1957).
We've seen some of these tricks before, most effectively in 1957's The Incredible Shrinking Man and 1989's Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.
As for the effects, they're generally excellent, particularly in a bravura inner-space sequence that hearkens back to the 1957 classic The Incredible Shrinking Man.
He must be larger than the young woman, yet he appears shrunken, very much like Grant Williams on his date with the carnival woman in that 1950s exposé of vanishing humanity, "The Incredible Shrinking Man.")
Nor is it a tale of spiritual transcendance and acceptance, like "The Incredible Shrinking Man." Rather, it is a relatively straightforward and heartfelt adventure tale of what it takes to be a survivor.
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And they are so many times larger than the humans that I was reminded of the scale used in "The Incredible Shrinking Man."
Like The Incredible Shrinking Man and other films with minuscule protagonists, this one delightfully presents the world we think we know, from another perspective.
At heart, Transcendence is a throwback to the fear-mongering science fiction of the past: not those atomic-age adventures like The Incredible Shrinking Man , but rather the lab-bound likes of The Andromeda Strain and Demon Seed , circa the paranoid '70s.
What Dreams May Come was adapted from a novel by Richard Matheson, whose fascination with higher planes of existence dates back at least as far as his script for 1957's The Incredible Shrinking Man.
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The Shrinking Man, published in 1956 and immediately filmed as The Incredible Shrinking Man, considered the effects of radiation on an ordinary fellow who grows smaller and smaller, to infinitesimal size.
In the hands of Jack Arnold, Universal's best genre film director at that time (he was responsible for Creature from the Black Lagoon , the studio's best monster movie since the 1930s, and he went uncredited for reshooting the best parts of This Island Earth ), the film has a merciless pace and excellent scenes of tension, carried on the back of some of the very best special and visual effects of the decade.
It's incredible that director Jack Arnold ("Creature from the Black Lagoon"/"Tarantula") takes the so-so novel by Richard Matheson and makes it into an absorbing and intelligent pulp gem, one of the best in its genre, with the help of co-writers Richard Alan Simmons and Mr. Matheson (his first script).