Journey To The Center
Of The Earth

2.5 Waffles!

If you can see Journey to the Center of the Earth in 3D, go for it! It’s a very straight forward, sometimes Disney-esque silly movie, but one worth your time if you can see it the way it was intended to be viewed by audiences (with stuff flying off the screen at your head!), but they missed out when we weren’t given a theme song by Steve Perry (I'll never stop believing).

Brendan Fraser stars as Trevor – a college professor who studies volcanoes, just like his brother, who disappeared several years ago. While the brother’s son, Sean (Josh Hutcherson), is staying with Trevor for a few days, our volcanologist discovers an old copy of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth complete with all sorts of notes made in the margins by his brother (Detective Bookman better not find out about that link to IMDB page). Trevor assumes this could be the key to finding his missing sibling, because the classic Verne story could be true, and his brother went off to find this mysterious, legendary passage way to the center of the Earth.

Can Trevor and Sean follow the book and find the center of the Earth?

Is that a good idea?

Journey to the Center of the Earth is the first movie to be filmed in digital 3D, which has some great benefits and pitfalls for the movie on several levels. First, this is the wave of the future. Theaters across America and worldwide are starting to convert to a new digital format that will lead to all sorts of benefits for moviemakers and studios, but you don’t care about them. What does it mean for you when you buy a $9 ticket to a movie?

In the case of Journey to the Center of the Earth, it means a film with a continuous 3D look adding depth to every set and situation (visual depth, not emotional or intellectual depth, but more about that later), some cool special effects, but some other scenes where director Eric Brevig is trying too hard to use the 3D effect to wow the audience. In one scene, a yo-yo flies out at the audience, and, in another, balls spill out and bounce around the screen. Both scenes feel forced to show off the 3D effect, but other scenes, where the action already is enthralling are enhanced by the 3D view (floating magnetic rocks and center of the earth piranhas!).

The four person writing team doesn’t make Journey to the Center of the Earth very challenging for the audience, because it relies on the tried, true, typical and trite plotlines, which leads to a kid friendly action movie with lots of theme park ride-type moments. However, Journey to the Center of the Earth is a great example of the kind of movie visuals we can expect in the future.

Journey to the Center of the Earth is rated PG for intense adventure action and some scary moments.