JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1993 Mark R. Leeper
Science fiction year on television continues unabated and now takes a nose-dive straight down. JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH has absolutely no connection to the story by Jules Verne, as I am sure the spirit of Verne would want to impress on each and every one of us.
The plot involves an eccentric scientist (played by F. Murray Abraham) who believes there is a world inside the Earth. He builds a mole machine that looks like the nose of an airplane, a tank tread, and a rocket engine. He sinks into the unknown. Ten years later, his nephew is planning his own mole machine only to discover that a mysterious industrialist has already built the thing. It looks like a tube of toothpaste with rockets set backwards on some tank treads. A crew of young hunks is chosen and the whole bunch heads off into the inner earth. Sound silly? No, the silliness is just beginning. I didn't even mention that the mole machine has a holographic personality, a woman's head floating in a blue bubble. Then there is the piece of the "Book of Knowledge" that looks like an executive's desk decoration but which was actually spit up by Mt. Vesuvius. One thing it does not look like is anything you could call a book.
Now once inside the Earth--where they get by diving into an erupting volcano--they find a rather diffident Abominable Snowman whom they teach English in seconds using an electronic device they happen to have in the mole machine. The scholar on the trip wants to name the snowman Daedalus, which the scholar thinks is the name of a Greek God (Daedalus was a mortal, not a god). Everyone else calls the Snowman the supremely inappropriate name Dallas. Also in the interior of the Earth are some things that look to us like manta rays with vampire fangs. There are also prehistoric troglodytes and a 3000-year-old mastermind living in something that looks like a lobster shell being fed by tubes of green fluid. This is clearly a series with more imagination than intelligence.
The look of the series varies a great deal. Initially there is some beautiful footage of volcanic eruptions. The sets of the interior of the Earth look very plastic. Perhaps most irritating is the wipe between scenes and when the program goes to a commercial: the entire picture seems to get sucked into a hole at the center of the picture, through the miracle of morph special effects.
To make a long story short, in the battle for capturing science fiction fans to new series, JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH is a non-combatant. If you missed the pilot, you missed all there is going to be.
Mark R. Leeper
att!mtgzfs3!leeper
leeper@mtgzfs3.att.com
Copyright 1993 Mark R. Leeper
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