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Here you go: Jules Verne for Dummies. "Journey to the Center of the Earth" is an old-timey sci-fi adventure for the rest of us! Verne's classic story has been contemporized and deliberately lobotomized. It's clear that the filmmakers intended to make a lighthearted adventure, a silly romp with cool visual effects.
The movie is silly, all right ¬-- silly doesn't begin to cover it, actually -- but it's not the kind of silly that anyone should be proud of. As for lightheartedness, romping and gee-whiz visuals, I've got three words for you: bits and pieces. Like its ambitions, the rewards of this "Journey" are modest. Brendan Fraser plays Trevor, a dorky geology professor with few students and minimal funding. Actually, he plays himself as that one guy he played in "The Mummy" and "The Mummy Returns," only if that guy had decided to settle down, stop infuriating mummies and teach geology in the 21st century. At any rate, our main man of geologic whiz-bangery gets saddled for 10 days with Sean (Josh Hutcherson), his hip, surly nephew. The two forge a tentative bond over a box of old junk that belonged to Max, Trevor's brother and Sean's father. Max had a cherished and heavily annotated paperback copy of "Journey to the Center of the Earth," and, holy bleep, after the boys take an impromptu research vacation to Iceland, they discover that the classic adventure story is not just a book. Old Jules Verne was telling the truth! Remember how we established that the movie is silly? Along with fetching Hannah (Anita Briem), their sassy, resourceful Icelandic mountain guide, Sean and Trev find themselves stranded deep within the bowels of the Earth following a chain of freak accidents. Can they make it back to the surface? The trio's underground adventures are distinctly sequential -- first one thrill/fright/predicament, then the next, with each new dilemma patiently waiting its turn. It's like a theme park ride, or a computer game, except that computer games are more sophisticated. Director Eric Brevig is a career special effects expert, and some of that experience is reflected here. Things tend to look fairly cool, but also strangely sparse. There's exactly one angry dinosaur for example. And he apparently lives alone in an underground desert and eats only the occasional lost human explorer. It's like the studio said, "OK, fine, we'll pay for a tyrannosaurus, but does there have to be anything else in that scene? Anything at all? We're on a budget, you know." I mean, it's no wonder that T-Rex can't even run faster than T-Rev. The poor thing is starving. Fraser doesn't go beyond his exasperated/reluctant hero shtick and Hutcherson is kind of bland, so the spunky Briem is an especially welcome presence. The movie is advertised as being in 3D, but it's hard to fathom precisely why they bothered. There are several gimmicky shots that play with the "RealD" technology in the first 15-20 minutes, but it doesn't ever look natural and, after a while, the filmmakers seem to forget it's even there. Like most of its action, "Earth" ends up being flat. D+ Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D Director: Eric Brevig Cast: Brendan Fraser, Josh Hutcherson, Anita Briem Running time: 1 hr., 32 min. Rating: PG for intense adventure action and some scary moments Location: Opens Friday at theaters everywhere |
