There is a part of me that will
always have affection for a movie like "Journey to the Center of the
Earth." It is a small part and steadily shrinking, but once I put on the
3-D glasses and settled in my seat, it started perking up. This is a fairly bad
movie, and yet at the same time maybe about as good as it could be. There may
not be an 8-year-old alive who would not love it. If I had seen it when I was
8, I would have remembered it with deep affection for all these years, until I
saw it again and realized how little I really knew at that age.
You are already familiar with
the premise, that there is another land inside of our globe. You are familiar
because the Jules Verne novel has inspired more than a dozen movies and
countless TV productions, including a series, and has been ripped off by such
as Edgar Rice Burroughs, who called it Pellucidar, and imagined that the Earth
was hollow and there was another world on the inside surface. (You didn't ask,
but yes, I own a copy of Tarzan at the Earth's Core with the original dust
jacket.)
In this version, Brendan Fraser
stars as a geologist named Trevor, who defends the memory of his late brother,
Max, who believed the center of the Earth could be reached through
"volcanic tubes." Max disappeared on a mysterious expedition, which,
if it involved volcanic tubes, should have been no surprise to him. Now Trevor
has been asked to spend some time with his nephew, Max's son, who is named Sean
(Josh Hutcherson). What with one thing and another, wouldn't you know they find
themselves in Iceland, and peering down a volcanic tube. They are joined in
this enterprise by Hannah (Anita Briem), who they find living in Max's former
research headquarters near the volcano he was investigating.
Now begins a series of adventures,
in which the operative principle is: No matter how frequently or how far they
fall, they will land without injury. They fall very frequently, and very far.
The first drop lands them at the bottom of a deep cave, from which they cannot
possibly climb, but they remain remarkably optimistic: "There must be a
way out of here!" Sure enough, they find an abandoned mine shaft and climb
aboard three cars of its miniature railway for a scene that will make you swear
the filmmakers must have seen "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom."
Just like in that movie, they
hurtle down the tracks at breakneck speeds; they're in three cars, on three
more or less parallel tracks, leading you to wonder why three parallel tracks
were constructed at great expense and bother, but just when such questions are
forming, they have to (1) leap a chasm, (2) jump from one car to another, and
(3) crash. It's a funny thing about that little railway: After all these years,
it still has lamps hanging over the rails, and the electricity is still on.
The problem of lighting an
unlit world is solved in the next cave they enter, which is inhabited by cute
little birds that glow in the dark. One of them makes friends with Sean, and
leads them on to the big attraction -- a world bounded by a great interior sea.
This world must be a terrible place to inhabit; it has man-eating and
man-strangling plants, its waters harbor giant-fanged fish and fearsome sea
snakes that eat them, and on the further shore is a Tyrannosaurus rex.
So do the characters despair?
Would you despair, if you were trapped miles below the surface in a cave and
being chased by its hungry inhabitants? Of course not. There isn't a moment in
the movie when anyone seems frightened, not even during a fall straight down
for thousands of feet, during which they link hands like sky-divers and carry
on a conversation. Trevor gets the ball rolling: "We're still
falling!"
I mentioned 3-D glasses earlier
in the review. Yes, the movie is available in 3-D in "selected theaters."
Select those theaters to avoid. With a few exceptions (such as the authentic
IMAX process), 3-D remains underwhelming to me -- a distraction, a
disappointment and more often than not offering a dingy picture. I guess
setting your story inside the Earth is one way to explain why it always seems
to need more lighting.
The movie is being shown in 2-D
in most theaters, and that's how I wish I had seen it. Since there's that part
of me with a certain weakness for movies like this, it's possible I would have liked
it more. It would have looked brighter and clearer, and the photography
wouldn't have been cluttered up with all the leaping and gnashing of teeth.
Then I could have appreciated the work of the plucky actors, who do a lot of
things right in this movie, of which the most heroic is keeping a straight
face.
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