Journey To The Center Of The Earth

Don’t be deterred by the fact that this movie is ostensibly based on a novel published in 1864. If you have no patience, no tolerance for intellectualism, no ability to suspend disbelief, and no imagination of your own, you can still enjoy it.

Witness: It has that guy from The Mummy in it. Remember how he kept swinging swords and stuff to disable monsters at the last second? More of that here.

And isn’t it funny how he stops screaming mid-fall to comment on how far he’s falling? Conveniently, this will also ensure that you’re not scared about what’s going to happen to him…little chance of a likable character ending up impaled on a stalactite after that.

The more typical editing choice would be to keep us in suspense about how or where they land, so that we’ll see the movie. But in a ground-breaking choice, this trailer shows them plunging safely into water. Because it’s not about suspense, see? It’s actually a lot like that long scene in Godard’s Weekend, where you’re tracking past all those cars waiting in line, and it seems to go on forever, and eventually you realize that wondering where it ends is missing the point, because that’s just not what the movie is about!

You may be wondering: If this movie is all about the effects, and they’re not going to even bother making the story interesting or believable at all, then why go through the motions of calling it Journey To The Center Of The Earth?

Well, you see, that book is in the public domain. The studio doesn’t have to buy the rights to it. And since
it has a fairly sound narrative structure already built in, along with a lot of fantastical descriptions that haven’t been interpreted for the big screen since 1959 (but which have been interpreted for TV many times, showing what great fodder they are for crap), trivialities like coming up with an original way to tell the story, or good dialog, can be left in the trash bin where they belong.

Journey To The Center Of The Earth Trailer