From nationalpost.com:
Theres a scene in Journey to the Center of the Earth where three people trapped in a mine get into one of those little trains that run along the underground tracks and go on a roller-coaster ride that takes them up and down and over many bumps and hills and gaps. Its wild and breathtaking and also phoney-looking - the movie is made in glorious 3D with all of the digitized artificiality that the process implies - and it looks for all the world like the test run for a ride at Disneyland.
And maybe it is.
Journey to the Center of the Earth is both one of those summer “thrill rides” youre always reading about in the ads, and also that youre always riding at a theme park. One of the films distributors is Disney, the company that made Pirates of the Caribbean into a film franchise. This feels like a case of turning the tables and trying out proposed new rides in a movie.
If so, sign me up.
Journey isnt much of a film, but its a heck of a trip, especially for those of us who are suckers for 3D. Sure, its often just a trick to cover a lot of narrative gaps and make mundane effects look sensational, but it also works: This is the first narrative feature shot in digital 3D, and whether were cowering from giant dinosaurs or ducking from a long tape measure that threatens to poke us in the eye, its a cool way to enjoy a movie that practically revels in its silliness.
Its great fun. In other words, a sort of Indiana Jones lite.
Brendan Fraser - the likable, stolid goof who is making a career out of finding lost civilizations in buried locales - plays Trevor, a professor of something boring whose real interest is in the possibility of life under the surface of the Earth. His lost brother was a “Vernian,” a follower of Jules Verne, who wrote the novel on which this movie is based; in the films sole nod to contemporary metafiction, the novel is used as a guide to the actual trip to the centre.
After a lot of jabber and scientific nonsense about volcanology and fissures in the Earths mantle, Trevor and his nephew Sean Josh Hutcherson head off to Iceland to find the hole that will take them to the Earths core. They hook up with Hannah Anita Briem, an Icelandic actress with an accent thats a charming mixture of Irish and Danish, who is so cute that Sean calls for dibs on her.
Eventually, they find the lost world inside the planet, a place of hidden oceans, giant predators and several gooey surprises.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the centre of the Earth,” says Trevor, gazing out at the computer-generated beauty of colourful skies and soft clouds and three-dimensional bluebirds that glow with a sort of nauseating magic: we dont want three-dimensional bluebirds. Theyre for girls. We want three-dimensional giant flying piranhas.
Coming right up, actually, along with some other frightening creatures, even as Trevor, Sean and Hannah have to find their way back topside before theyre fried by molten lava, eaten by carnivorous plants or consumed altogether by computer-generated imagery. Theres a short timeout for the mandatory scene of emotional trauma - something to do with a lost father - and then were back on the 3D roller-coaster of a plot.
Director Eric Brevig is a special-effects expert, and thats what this movie is: an hour-and-a-half of candy floss.
A sequence where Sean has to cross some floating magnetic rocks is so vertiginous that I couldnt watch: contrived and unbelievable, perhaps, but so dizzying I had to take off my 3D glasses for a minute.
Its a summer thrill ride, all right, empty calories and all. If only a flying piranha had eaten that stupid bluebird, it would have been perfect.
