Innerspace (1987)
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Innerspace Movie Review
Innerspace is a 1987 science fiction comedy film directed by Joe Dante and starring Dennis Quaid, Martin Short and Meg Ryan. It’s a childish, but fun movie.
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“You’ve got a great future in front of you in Retail Food marketing,
and I just hate to see you throw it all away by going psycho on us“
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When Tuck volunteers to be miniaturized and put into the body of a lab rabbit, he is accidentally injected into a hypochondriac. A group of industrial spies are after both of them. This movie is similar to a 60s classic ‘Fantastic Voyage’, though obviously much less serious in its approach. There is a lot to talk about here, but let’s just state the obvious – this movie is the epitome of the eighties for better and for worse.
They crammed so many genres, elements and plot points into a two-hour movie that the result is not only ridiculously dense, but still somehow rushed due to its frenetic pacing. You’ve got the central SF hook that is mostly silly, but visually appealing as the scenes inside the human body are very imaginative and wildly entertaining.
You’ve also got a romance and I actually really liked this relationship between Ryan’s and Quaid’s characters. It’s genuinely sweet and very well developed. The baby twist was clever and quite emotional. But then you’ve also got the comedy angle and this is where the movie fell apart for me as the humor in it is so juvenile that it risked becoming purely a kids flick every single time that it extensively focused on humor that ranged from a lot of manic yelling to silly physical gags.
I did not care for these villains at all. The villains in Innerspace almost felt as if they were coming from a Bond movie with all the gadgets and weaponry, but a ridiculous, childish version of a Bond movie, one that you cannot ever take seriously. Others fare much better with the aforementioned Meg Ryan being very charming and pleasantly proactive and Dennis Quaid being typecast, but he plays the arrogant guys so well, so he was fine here.
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As for Martin Short, you either love him or you hate him. I personally tolerated him as he fitted the narrative as this crazy hypochondriac, but he was still one-note and the humor surrounding him got stale pretty quickly. The friendship between the two men was nice, though. I loved the VFX, though the Oscar should have gone to ‘Predator’ that year. The score from Jerry Goldsmith is incredible and the movie is very charming in its score and tone, but the direction from Joe Dante should have been better and he’s made much better movies for sure.
