IT MAY be more than 60 years old but The Incredible Shrinking Man has lost none of its power with the passing of time.
Released in a long-overdue Blu-ray from Arrow Home Entertainment, the film is still a masterclass in how to make popular science fiction that thrills as much as it makes you think. Spoofed beyond all recognition down the decades, director Jack Arnold’s groundbreaking adaptation of Richard Matheson’s powerful novel must have seemed revolutionary when it hit cinema screens in 1957.
It’s got a brilliant central premise – man shrinks down to the size of an insect and must cope with the horrors that the full-sized world throws at him – unforgettable set pieces of sci-fi hokum that still thrill in their ambition and execution and state of the art special effects that hold up better than most films made in the 21st century. It’s a triumph of old-school sci-fi invention that still feels fresh and is great fun to watch to this day.
While he’s away on his holidays with his wife, Scott Carey (Grant Williams) finds himself surrounded by an odd and eerie cloud. A little while later he comes to learn that the cloud is actually some form of atomic waste that is causing him to rapidly shrink in size. As he reduces in stature he is forced to take up a household sewing needle to take on a terrifying spider and take refuge in a dolls house when the traumas of the big world prove too much to take.
Given that it was made in 1957 there is plenty of social subtext, 'reds under the bed' paranoia and 'we’re all going to die' nuclear-apocalypse fear to consider in Matheson’s superb story but beyond the hidden meanings and postwar points that the film makes lies a rip-roaring adventure that should be seen by every young child with even a passing interest in how science fiction is portrayed on the cinema screen.
Where much sci-fi labours its satirical points and struggles to simply excite, The Incredible Shrinking Man knows that its primary job is to entertain and Arnold delivers the popcorn-munching movie magic by the bucket load. Like all good pulp-derived 50s fables, it cracks along at a breakneck pace with only an ill-advised sub-plot featuring our leading man’s unlikely liaison with a circus midget serving to slow things down a little.
It looks great in its new Blu-ray print and Grant Williams gives a properly heroic performance as the much-put-upon hero who finds himself diminishing by the minute. If you don’t feel a little insignificant speck in the universe after watching this then you’ve missed its main point frankly.
Included here is a splendid extended documentary on the other films that director Arnold made for Universal-International Studios including Creature From The Black Lagoon and Tarantula (both of which deserve the full deluxe reissue treatment as well).
There’s also a revealing interview with writer Richard Christian Matheson talking in depth about his father, who also penned the equally influential novel I Am Legend.
