Journey to the Center of the Earth

B+

While this movie won't win any awards or even much critical acclaim, it is still a fun movie that stays entertaining the whole way through. It throws in some science and literature along the way, which is a plus especially given the target audience of kids and tweens. Not exactly a remake of the famous Jules Verne book, instead the setup is that Verne's book could have been based on something true and so the main characters find themselves following along in that book while living out some of the same things that happened.

Brendan Fraser is perfect for this role: awkward, smart, dumb, and an action hero all at the same time. There aren't too many surprises here and when you find out that they need a flare to do something and only have three left, you know the first two won't work. There are elements that are tired, like the runaway mine car, but also a lot of new things that are fun to watch like falling down a bottomless hole and screaming for a while and then getting tired of screaming, so they all just talk on their way down.

They throw in a good-looking Icelandic mountain guide for a romantic interest (and the actress really is from Iceland!) and a happy ending. The movie originally was issued in 3D, but the Blu-ray disk I watched was not, which seems kind of a shame. The DVD extras were minimal and geared towards a kid audience, but there was a decent documentary about the history of the idea of a hollow earth.

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