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Literary journey

A summer blockbuster with some smarts
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By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
September 3rd, 2008 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
By the book. Rather than fiction, Jules Verne's book becomes a travelogue.
Journey to the Center of the Earth


Directed by Eric Brevig
With Brendan Fraser, Josh Hutcherson and Anita Briem
Since summer cinema generally offers a gradation of trash, it’s often the case that the least moronic summer film receives a level of praise that would’ve been denied had its release coincided with the annual Oscar rush in autumn and winter. After You Don’t Mess with the Zohan, an evening of used-car commercials or a health department reel highlighting the genetic perils of interbreeding would seem like Godard.
As summer blockbuster filler, Journey to the Center of the Earth is not bad. It has its flashes of idiocy and script-by-committee lapses. But it’s also, in its own way, literate. Indeed, it goes out of its way to make a case for reading Jules Verne — a nudge that might save a few teen boys from the duller pursuits of their mouth-breathing contemporaries.
This Journey is a riff on Verne, offering, as its premise, the idea that the protagonist in Verne’s novel, Professor Liedenbrock, was an actual person who made a subterranean trip to the Earth’s core. Verne was simply the professor’s amanuensis, busily taking dictation.
In Verne’s tale, Liedenbrock and his nephew, Axel, decipher a runic manuscript telling of a portal leading into the underworld, which can be found in an Icelandic crater. Arriving in Iceland, the pair hires a guide, Hans, to lead them to the center of the earth, where they find a Jurassic Eden, complete with hardly extinct dinosaurs and forests of giant mushrooms.
In this latest screen version of Journey, Brendan Fraser plays Professor Trevor Anderson, a geological geek incapable of firing his students with his passion for science. Anderson’s only friend was probably his brother, Max, a volcanologist, who went missing during a field study trip 10 years before.
One day, Max’s wife arrives in Anderson’s driveway to deliver a box of Max’s things along with her son, Sean (Josh Hutcherson), who is to stay with Anderson for a week. At first, Sean finds Anderson as boring as his students do. The two simply cannot connect. But then Anderson discovers Max’s copy of Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth among the delivered box’s contents, and finds the book filled with scientific marginalia, as if Max had recognized that the book was really a travelogue.
Soon another uncle and his nephew are heading to Iceland, where they hire a local rock-climber, Hannah (Anita Briem), to assist them in their trek. Before long, the three will be roughly transported into the mushroom forest by the subterranean sea. There they will find abandoned 19th-century equipment from Liedenbrock’s first exploration, along with more modern pieces that were obviously left by the long-lost Max.
Director Eric Brevig is known in Hollywood for his work as a special effects guru, responsible for the high-tech fireworks in Pearl Harbor and Men in Black, among other films. His computer and pyrotechnic mastery is fully displayed in Journey, which, if you didn’t know the book, could easily pass as an expensive ad campaign for the Jurassic Park River Adventure ride at Universal Studios. The film’s thrills do seem secondhand, from a famished Tyrannosaurus and menacing school of plesiosauruses to Knott’s Berry Farm–inspired roller coaster and log-flume rides.
The other hand-me-down aspect is that the film was shot to be shown in 3-D, and so groans with Bwana Devil setups to startle audiences wearing 3-D specs (not widely available here). So we get a sink-eye view of Fraser expelling his morning Listerine, a yo-yo seemingly aimed at our faces and cascading gobs of Tyrannosaurus saliva. (There is one good joke at the process’ expense, when Anderson removes an ancient 3-D stereoscope from Max’s box of belongings and says, “I have no idea what this is.”)
Perhaps the most ham-fisted mistake is introducing cute Disney birds into the adventure, little fluorescent sparrows with an alarming sense of self-knowledge that seem ready, should the proper signal be given, to begin sewing ball gowns. These creatures are undoubtedly a hat tip to the 1959 screen version of Journey to the Center of the Earth with James Mason, where the team of explorers included one Gertrude the duck (though the less family-friendly script writers for that film eventually slapped her on the menu).
Nevertheless, the performances here are all above average for this genre. Fraser, a good actor, has now become as typecast as Harrison Ford and Denzel Washington, yet remains dependable. Hutcherson and Briem also have good moments in this spectacle that at least has the good taste to be brief at 90 minutes.
Still, for Verneans, the film’s script contains some intelligent humor. Anderson suffers over translating a bit of runic crytography, just as Professor Liedenbrock did before him, only to have his nephew beat him to the answer — though Sean, unlike Axel, manages it very promptly using Google. At the end of their adventure, the uncle hands his now-beloved nephew a book on Atlantis, a nice reference to Verne’s superior 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, as well as a nod to the Mason film, which folded Atlantis into its world within the world.
Sean certainly has, at story’s end, learned the value of books. In one terrifying moment when he’s alone and lost underground, not knowing where to turn, he says, “Dang, I wish I’d read that book.” It’s a line that makes every clumsy touch of this blockbuster forgivable.
    

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


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Reader's comments:

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[00:12 09/09/2008] : By god, you nailed it...I took my kid brother to see this film on the strength of your recommendation, and despite your being at odds with many of your fellow film critics (at least in the American press) on several issues, you nonetheless captured its essence. Namely, that the film is a forgettable lark that ought to satiate the sort of moviegoer hungry for a better blockbuster than Zohan and the like. Thanks. The 3-D stunts were pretty campy, but my brother is young enough to never have had the pleasure of dodging yo-yos and dino spit before (a life-changing experience for every young man).
James Walling
Vancouver, WA USA
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