Film Feature	Jumping Off The Screen: Journey to the Center of the Earth by M. Faust

Remember how in the 1980s everyone was worried about how home video was going to kill off movie theaters? It hasn’t happened yet, and with luck it won’t happen, as long as the movie business keeps finding ways to make the theater experience unique. And thus Journey to the Center of the Earth, which star Brendan Fraser describes in his best techno-nerd voice as “the first feature-length digital narrative-driven live-action family adventure picture in 3D.”

You can overlook most of that tongue-twisting phrase other than the beginning and the end. Adapted from the Jules Verne novel, this is a 3D feature. It’s not a movie with some 3D sequences: The whole thing is in 3D. And it’s 3D that works. As someone who has been wearing eyeglasses since the first grade, I have been disappointed more often than not by trying to look at a movie through cardboard glasses that did nothing but give me a headache. It’s the 21st century: They’ve got that stuff worked out now.

Director Eric Brevig.

The trick, says director Eric Brevig, is in the projectors. He knows from 3D: Along with a career as an Oscar-winning visual effects designer (Total Recall, Pearl Harbor, Men in Black and many others), Brevig has spent two decades designing 3D shorts for Disney theme parks, including “Captain Eo” and “Honey I Shrunk the Audience.”

If you’ve been to any of those, you know that spectacular 3D effects are possible. We haven’t had them in movies because the process up until now has involved using two projectors that have to be perfectly lined up. In an era when modern movie theaters no longer have staff projectionists, this was not going to happen. As Brevig puts it during a Manhattan press junket for Journey, “In theme parks they could barely do it, and they have fulltime staff.”

Now, he explains, the technology exists to project 3D images using a single projector. “I knew this movie was possible when I saw Chicken Little at this small town theater near where I live in West Virginia, and literally the guy who sells the popcorn flipped on a switch to start the movie and it was flawlessly projected. Because that was the big hurdle keeping 3D from the masses.“

While this Journey has little that fans of the 1960 version will remember (“No Gertrude the duck, no Pat Boone in a kilt, no dinosaurs that are actually lizards with fins attached,” Brevig says), it is firmly in the tradition of Disney family adventures from the 1960s and meant to play equally well with audiences seeing it in regular 2D format (unfortunately the case in most Western New York area theaters).

Brendan Fraser stars as teacher/scientist Trevor Anderson, a specialist in the field of plate tectonics, as was his brother until he disappeared on an expedition to Iceland. Tracking his lost brother leads him to a cave that strands him thousands of miles beneath the surface of the Earth, accompanied by his young nephew Sean (Josh Hutcherson) and their Icelandic guide Hannah (Anita Briem). It’s a world filled with prehistoric creatures and wondrous landscapes, that they appreciate as best they can while looking for a way back to the surface of the earth.

Naming films like Fantastic Voyage and the work of Ray Harryhausen (Jason and the Argonauts, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad) as his childhood favorites, Brevig was “a kid who loved fantasy movies and wanted to know how they were done so I could do them myself. I was self-taught because this was just before special effects became such a big deal [in the late 1970s].

“I grew up in that era when family films weren’t dumbed down. I took my own kids to anything that they could get into. And so many of the films were just not enjoyable for adults. So one of the goals with Journey was to tell a story where the parents will get the jokes on their level—I think Pixar does an amazingly good job of that—and kids react to what’s on the screen.”

Brevig was particularly cautious of not wanting his debut as a director to be seen as a mere special effects showcase. “I was constantly downplaying the 3D,” he says. “The studio wanted us to throw more things at the camera. So we compromised where we did.

“The stuff that’s ‘off the screen,’ I tried to not make that feel like a gimmick. There a couple of them that are just blatant, to show the audience why they put on the glasses, But I tried to organically integrate those in to the scenes so they don’t take you out of the movie. This movie will also be seen in 2D by a lot of people, and I didn’t want to stop the movie [for them].”

Enjoyable as the eye-popping effects are, the story works without them. “We showed it to all demographics and uniformly everyone enjoys it in the same places. Adults get some gags that kids don’t, like when Brendan [is going through a box of his brother’s effects], picks up a stereopticon and tosses it aside because he doesn’t know what it is—that’s for the nerd 3D crowd, they shriek with laughter when they see that. It plays the same no matter where we go.”

Of his star, Brendan Fraser, Brevig says “What a smart guy. He became a very important creative collaborator on the movie. He came to our first meeting with two things, with the original Jules Verne book, and with a 1950s 3D still camera. He put them both down on the table, said, ‘I love this kind of story, I love 3D, here are my suggestions for how to improve the character.’ The script we had at that point was not the script we shot, it was not in as good a shape. He solved some problems that I had been struggling with, and we were off and running.”

Is the studio worried about competition from the upcoming The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, which also has Fraser joined on his adventures by a teen-aged relative? Not at all. As Brevig puts it, “They can take the giant billboards for our movie and just paint different people around Brendan for The Mummy!”

Journey ends with an obvious lead-in for a continuation in which Trevor, Sean and Hannah look for the mythical undersea kingdom of Atlantis. There are as yet no plans for a sequel, Brevig would love to make one. Asked about the possibility of an Atlantis movie, he smiles “I hope so! Underwater 3D is really cool!”