Journey to the Center of the Earth
For a harmless "Indiana Jones" knock-off, "Journey to the Center of the Earth" has an awful lot riding on it. The new film - the umpteenth screen iteration of the 1864 Jules Verne sci-fi novel - is also the latest movie to try to take 3-D technology mainstream.
Using plastic polarized glasses (rather than grandpa's red-and-green paper specs) and filmed with a camera invented by James Cameron for his own 3-D spectacular, "Avatar" (due in late 2009), "Journey" arrives in 800 US theaters that have been hastily fitted with the RealD digital projection system. The
What that immediately translates into is: Duck, you suckers - we're throwing more stuff at your heads. "Journey to the Center of the Earth" is perfectly engaging in a low-rent Saturday-matinee way, but when Brendan Fraser spits toothpaste at the camera about five minutes in, you know the spirit of 1981's "Comin' at Ya!" - the silliest entry in the last major 3-D push - lives on.
Fraser imports his amiable charisma from the "Mummy" movies to play Trevor Anderson, a hapless scientist whose brother Max (Jean Michel Pare) disappeared while exploring volcanic tubes that allow access to the earth's core. Max was a "Vernean," and so is Trevor: He believes Verne's book wasn't speculative fiction but a Lonely (Inner) Planet travel guide.
He's about the only one. The hero's teenage nephew Sean (Josh Hutcherson, the go-to sensitive toughie of recent family films) hasn't read Verne and can barely be pried from his
Well, it's not hell, but it's almost as hot. After a tumble down the tube, a rocketing ride in mine carts, a plummet through a thin sheet of muscovite, and another endless fall, the three wind up in a center of the earth that looks like the world's biggest unfinished basement. Which, in a sense, it is.
Except that unfinished basements don't have bioluminescent songbirds and galloping T. Rexes. "Journey to the Center of the Earth" sends Trevor, Sean, and Hannah traversing the core toward a hoped-for exit hole before rising temperatures vaporize them, and it throws what Sean calls Verne's "dangerous bits" at them, and us, with regularity. Toothy prehistoric fish, carnivorous plants, rampaging plesiosaurs all put in an appearance, and the movie buckets along with the pleasurable pause-eek-pause of an above-average theme park ride.
The movie feels weirdly underpopulated, though - a bare-bones approximation of epic splendor. The 3-D visuals, almost all in unappealing shades of brown, give the underground caverns clarity and depth but little weight; they're painterly vistas with small humans daubed into a corner. The only scene that breaks through into magic comes early, when the heroes' fall down a vent is broken by rising water droplets that slowly coalesce to form an underground sea. For a brief moment, we're not sure which way is up, and the disorientation feels delicious.
The rest of "Journey" remains earthbound. There are worse places to be, I suppose, since the cast is good company, and the action is steadily paced by Eric Brevig, a special effects craftsman getting his first shot at directing. He uses 3-D mostly for ambience, and he goes easy on the gotcha shots, but they're there, of course, since what 3-D movie would be complete without a yo-yo flying toward your head at high speed? (That bit, I'm guessing, is a tip of the hat to the paddleball man in 1953's pioneering "House of Wax.")
"Journey" is fun for the kiddies but it hardly represents an advance: As before, the gimmickry can't lift the boats of a threadbare storyline. What the proselytizers and the investors forget is that if the characters and emotions aren't three-dimensional, the rest of the movie will always look flat.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/movienation.
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