I had problems watching this one. Not for the reason you think. It’s currently on HBO Max, but when I selected it, the movie wouldn’t start. I found by sheer chance that I could watch the movie if I just tapped the fast forward button for a few seconds’ worth of runtime, but the movie otherwise didn’t load. And even though I finished the movie, my smart TV is still asking me if I want to finish it. That was just plain weird.
Also, I plan on the next review being for the new Thor movie. You know, for anyone who actually cares what I have to say about more recent movies.
Geologist Sir Oliver Lindenbrook (James Mason) gets a rock from admiring student Alec McEwan (Pat Boone with a shaky Scottish accent, and yes he does sing). Said rock inspires the professor to travel to an Icelandic volcano where, it happens, there’s a possible path to the center of the Earth. While there, he finds a rival of sorts murdered, but the man’s widow (Arlene Dahl) will allow Lindenbrook to have her late husband’s supplies so long as he takes her with them. They need her anyway to act as an interpreter for Hans, a large Icelandic man recruited to basically be the group’s muscle. Plus, Hans brings his pet duck Gertrude. The group finds a cave that leads downward into the bowels of the Earth.
However, they are being followed by Count Saknussemm (Thayer David). Saknussemm believes, because an ancestor of his went down this way first, that all this territory is actually his. He is the one who murdered Professor Goteborg, and he isn’t above adding to the body count since he sees the expedition as trespassers. Then again, he seems like the sort of pompous ass who will get what he deserves eventually.
OK, for starters, throw out anything you know about what is actually underground. This is a movie where Mason’s Lindenbrook will confidently state that they won’t have to worry about finding water because there will be plenty of mineral springs as they go down, and he’s proven right. For the most part, there are no patches of molten rock. There’s what looks like a sunny beach at one point despite being miles underground. And I am guessing Pat Boone was considered a sex symbol because he spends a lot of time in the movie shirtless. There are still dinosaurs down there, mostly in the form of lizards with fins glued to their backs and projected to make them look bigger than they actually are. It’s that sort of movie.
And, as that movie, it largely works. Sure, there’s a scene where Lindenbrook and McEwan, trapped in a barn, think Gertrude the duck tapping on the wall is someone speaking in code and try to talk to them, but it’s a family friendly adventure. Then again, the fate of Gertrude shows a bit more about what kind of movie this is, but that is arguably the darkest moment in the whole movie. Yeah, the characters are basically just the wise professor, the combative widow, the young heartthrob, and the big guy, but it’s a formula that works because of the gravitas someone like Mason could bring to the project. And it helps that he and Dahl’s Carla don’t quite fall in love during the course of the movie, the implication being they just bickered for several months as they continued to work their way down deeper into the Earth. Knowing anything about science will probably ruin this sort of movie if you actually try to think about it, but this was from Jules Verne. The point is to be more delighted than enlightened, and to that end, the movie largely succeeds.
Grade: A-
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