Take ‘Journey’ in 3-D to avoid dead end

“Journey to the Center of the Earth” is cinematic sci-fi proof that the Earth’s core is made of cheese. Mercifully, it’s old-fashioned, family-friendly B-movie cheese, served up in this Brendan Fraser/Jules Verne action epic for kids.

Seek out this “Journey” in a theater showing it in 3-D. You’ll want the T-Rex, with his snapping teeth, the bio-luminescent birds, the gigantic Venus flytraps and that mouthwash Fraser spits down his sink all right in your face. Or lap.

This is 3-D the way it used to be – playful, used for effect, but not really a technology that can lift a middling movie much beyond tolerable.

Fraser stars as a Trevor Anderson, a teacher of “tectonics physics,” a man who has studied the deep geology of the Earth and its relationship to the drift of continents. His brother did the same. But Max, that brother, went missing 10 years ago.

When Trevor baby-sits Max’s 13-year-old son, Sean (Josh Hutcherson), they stumble across Max’s annotated copy of Jules Verne’s “Journey to the Center of the Earth.” Max, it appears, was a “Vernian,” somebody who took the 19th century sci-fi writer’s fiction as fact. And he disappeared looking for a way into the center of the Earth.

So the lads race to Iceland to follow Max’s trail, take up with a doubting and sexy Icelandic mountain guide (Anita Briem) and work their way into the planet through a volcano, facing one crisis after another with one one-liner after another.

The Verne novel has been adapted every 20 years or so, pretty much since the dawn of cinema. The fantastical notion of a primordial “world within the world” is irresistible as juvenile entertainment.

Is it fantastic as film fantasy? Not really. But then, if you’ve got anything in memory to compare it to, it’s not for you.

As a fun piece of kids’ sci-fi, though, “Journey” has science and pseudo-science and cliff-hanging action, all flung at you in those wacky 3-D glasses.

– By Roger Moore, The Orlando Sentinel

“The Children of Huang Shi”

If good intentions produced good movies, “The Children of Huang Shi” would be a classic.

It’s a saga about a selfish man overcoming his base instincts and leading a band of orphans to safety across a war-ravaged landscape. Audiences tolerant of clichéd uplift may dab their eyes, but demanding moviegoers will look elsewhere.

The fact-based story stars Jonathan Rhys Meyers as George Hogg, a British reporter covering the Japanese invasion of China in 1937. Impersonating a Red Cross driver, he enters occupied Nanjing, where he photographs mass executions of civilians before the Japanese capture him. He’s about to be executed when he’s saved by rebel leader Chen Hansheng (Chow Yun-Fat).

George, who sees the war as an opportunity for headline-grabbing career advancement, asks to follow Chen to the front, but the Communist soldier insists that he recuperate and learn Mandarin. With the help of nurse Lee Pearson (Radha Mitchell), George is set up in the unstaffed, ill-equipped Huang Shi orphanage for boys.

The kids are suspicious of the newcomer, but George repairs the facilities and supplies provisions with the help of Lee, black market queen Mrs. Wang (Michelle Yeoh) and some aggressive gardening.

As Japanese forces near, and Chinese nationalist forces seize boys to serve as child soldiers, George bundles his five dozen children and supplies onto mule-drawn carts, and sets off for refuge in Sandhan, 700 miles across the Gobi Desert and over snow-shrouded mountains.

If the film had concentrated on the odyssey, which has dramatic incidents to spare, it could have been a rousing adventure instead of a hokey time-waster. But the heavy-handed script engineers a trite love triangle between Lee, Chen and George, and director Roger Spottiswoode ladles sentimentality over the orphans like sweet plum sauce.

– By Colin Covert, Minneapolis Star Tribune

For times and locations, see page 11.