Review of Journey to the Center of the Earth

Yes, I'm not dead. Yes, I apologize for not posting anything but movie reviews and no new chapters for a few weeks. I don't know, but I just seem to have lost the flair and excitement that I had while writing during the off seasons.

So yeah. A little backstory before we begin. I wasn't extremely excited to see this movie, but with my brother's birthday coming up, we thought it only fair that we go see it before The Dark Knight puts a bat-boot up its ass and kicks it out of the theaters. I would have much rather have gone to see Hellboy 2, but oh well. We can't have everything.

The movie starts out with a kid named Sean coming to his uncle Trevor's house to stay the week or something for some reason. Sean brings a box filled with things that belonged to his father, along with a copy of Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth, which is full of markings his father made. They find out that one of his father's seismic probes has gone off in Iceland, so they set off to find what set it off. (No pun intended.)

While there they meet a mountain guide named Hannah who guides them to the probe. When they get there, a storm pops up and they're forced to dive into a cave which subsequently collapses shut, trapping them. They try to get out by going deeper in the cave when it turns out that blah blah blah, yeah we've all been here before.

I gotta say, this movie was a very big dissapointment. I don't even know where to begin.

First off, I'm not exactly sure who the target audience for this movie was supposed to be. In the trailer, it shows itself off as a new kind of Jurassic Park, with lots of action and T-rex fights, but it also tries to appeal to the scientific community as well with bits and pieces of useles knowlege thrown in for dramatic effect. It fails on both accounts.

It does have a couple of decent action scenes, but they're usually ten or fifteen minutes of downtime until another one starts. And as for the scientific factor... dear god, this movie failed.

I am a scientifically designed individual. This doesn't mean that I'm such a Darwin thumping indiviual that I'm not able to accept new theories. So for the moment, let's just say that a hollow pocket in the center of the earth is possible and by some freak anomoly is able to support life. So what do we get from about 100 million years of creatures evolving down here? A few overgrown venus fly traps, some overgrown pirhanas, some overgrown mushrooms, a single regular sized T-rex, and a few Loch Ness Monsters thrown in for good measure. One mark for lack of originality.

If you take a look back at how things have evolved in the past 40 million years, we should have a hell of a lot more original things for a hundred million years worth of evolution. So, another mark for lack of creativity and empty-headedness.

Let's compare this to a much better alternate-reality movie, Peter Jackson's King Kong. Both of these movies are fairly tied for improbablity, but King Kong pulls it off so much better, plain and simple. KK has many more original examples of how the things on the island evolved, even though it doesn't go into as much detail. A couple of V-rexes (Yes, they are different enough visually to warrant a change of name), a giant ape and a few hundred giant bats are much more believable than a single T-rex and a few plesiosaurs.

Plus, much of the science in this movie doens't even make any sense. There is this one part where the kid has to traverse a stepping stones of magnetic rocks. Magnetic rocks? Um, yeah... no, no, that's fine. We can roll with it. What's more, once he's on the other side, the compass continues to point towards where he wants to go, and not back from where the magnetic rocks are. For all the non-scientists that don't know how what I'm talking about, believe me when I say that this makes NO FUCKING SENSE! If it was just another cheesy action flick, I could forgive this, but this is a movie that actually tries to be scientific, and FAILS at it. A final mark against it for lack of scientific clarity.

If this movie were a little bit more clear as to who it was aimed at, it might actually have saved a little bit of face. As it is now, it's just a way to cash in on people looking for a scientific movie with some decent action.

Final verdict: 6/10. Not worth the 6 dollars. Take my word for it.

I would post some more, but it's getting really late and I'm tired. And don't worry, I'll most likely review Dark Knight on the day or the day after it comes out.

Hentai forever,
Kyouger.