So a professor walks into the earth…
It sounds like the beginning of a bad joke, but this is the basic premise of every iteration of Jules Verne’s famous book, Journey to the Centre of the Earth, I’m familiar with. And, personally, I think it’s a good premise, ripe for the imagination.
I grew up watching the 1959 movie starring James Mason (who also starred in another movie based on the writings of Jules Verne: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954)), and I remembered enjoying it. Oh, the wonders it displayed! The danger! The possibility! While flipping through my family’s movie catalog, I came across the DVD and was struck with an urge as magnetic as the center of the earth to revisit it. Since it’s one of my dad’s favorites, it wasn’t long before I convinced my family to revisit it with me.
So we watched it one night after dinner, and it was as good as I remembered—no, better. Who knew how long it had been since I’d seen it last? I was likely a child, with a peewee child brain. Returning to it as an adult, I got much more out of it. And, now that I’m in a season of life where I’m attempting to read a lot of books (which, contrary to the fact that I’m a writer, I didn’t actually do much of when I was younger), I decided it was time to read the book for myself and compare.
Oh, and the 2008 movie with Brendan Fraser exists. I’ll get to that, too. Fear not.
Right now, let’s go in chronological order, and start with the source material that started it all: Journey to the Centre of the Earth (“Voyage au centre de la Terre,” in its native French).
Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864)
The book is largely concerned with the science and “How” of such an expedition, and that’s as much as I’ll introduce without getting into comparisons and contrasts just yet. It was easy to read, the chapters were short and bled into each other, which often kept me reading onto the next. It is sciencey, but I was able to follow it as someone who isn’t very brainy. It was pretty linear, and I never got bored, but(!) it was pretty dull. I differentiate between boring and dull.
Summary
The story is narrated in first-person by Axel, nephew to the renowned Professor Otto Lidenbrock: a German mineralogist, geologist, polyglot, bibliophile, and what they called “eccentric” and I call “sociopath.”
After purchasing an old, old Icelandic book, the professor discovers a slip of paper inside with a puzzling cryptograph. He’s temperamental, devoted to science, and has minimal-to-no value for human life, so he decides no one in his household will eat until he’s cracked the code. This disregard for literally everything but himself and his goal is common throughout the book, but today’s thoughts are not concerned with granular analysis, so I’ll move on.
It’s Axel who ends up cracking the code: a 300-year-old message from an Icelandic scientist, Arne Saknussemm, claiming there’s a way to enter below the earth’s crust in Iceland, and he himself has traveled to the center of the earth and survived to write this cryptic message about it. At once, after packing necessities, the professor sets off and drags his nephew along with him.
In Iceland, they pick up Hans Bjelke, who serves as their guide and hired muscle, and then their descent begins.
I’m actually skipping over quite a bit of content, for those curious, or perhaps outraged at my neglect. None of what I’m skipping is essential to the overarching plot. There is a lot of sitting, thinking, waiting, and scientific debating in this book.
Once they’re below sea level, under the earth, their impractical journey goes relatively smoothly. The first path they take is a dead end, they run out of water because of that detour, Axel gets separated from the group, breaks his light source, and runs madly in the dark before reuniting with his uncle and Hans. They encounter some underground sea monsters who harm each other instead of the travelers who disturbed their waters, then run into a storm, and that’s about the bulk of their troubles. To be clear, they have very real, human troubles, but it’s not an overly stimulating journey, particularly for a non-scientific mind. The book’s wonder is derived from what scientists—who are, in fact, the ones taking this journey—would find fascinating, not the casual consumer. Which is why I give it due credit for being interesting in its own right.
But that relatively smooth journey is full of dead silence and darkness, granite tunnels and caves. It isn’t until more than halfway through the book they discover an ocean under the earth’s surface, and the book ends with that discovery, as the small party are launched out of a volcano before they can continue any further into the earth. It would be one of the dullest things you could possibly adapt to screen.
Beside the plot, the characters were little more than plot-vehicles. Professor Lidenbrock is absurdly over-intelligent, and he’s too self-absorbed and manipulative to feel happy for when all of his theories prove correct and Axel is proven wrong. He reads like a two-dimensional villain, except he’s the main character—the journey is his. Hans is a non-entity. He’s silent before they descend into the earth and has no way of communicating with Axel, the narrator, so he might as well not exist except for the story’s need for his muscle. But Axel is human enough to follow along with, otherwise it may have been a less tolerable read.
Overall, I enjoyed it, and it may even be worth rereading in the future.
Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959)
I’m a purist, and usually an advocate for hewing as close to an original vision as possible. There are practical concerns when transitioning from one medium to another, so not even the best book-to-screen adaptations will be identical, but there’s something to be said for an adaptation that really tries to remain faithful to the work that inspired it—to look into a fragment of someone’s mind and soul, be awed by what someone imagined, and set out to make what they saw in their heads real. However, in the case of Journey to the Center of the Earth, there is something to be said for the adaptation that, instead of asking Verne’s question, “How would you pull that off?” asked, “What would that look like?” Because you really do need a lot of change to make something like Journey to the Centre of the Earth look interesting.
The screenwriter himself, Walter Reisch, had this to say:
“The master's [Jules Verne’s] work, though a beautiful basic idea, went in a thousand directions and never achieved a real constructive "roundness". With the exception of the basic idea, there is very little of the novel left in the film.”
Summary
Renowned Scottish Professor Oliver Lindenbrook has just been knighted for his achievements, so the college he teaches at honors him, and one of his students, Alec McEwan, gifts him with a volcanic rock he found at a shop (it sounds lame, but this is actually a really good gift for geology nerds).
This rock from Alec is heavier than it should be for its composition, so Professor Lindenbrook, the dutiful mineralogist, examines it at the cost of a planned dinner with guests (including Alec). When Alec comes to find out why the professor is a no-show, he is present when the rock goes ka-boom and reveals a plumb bob with an inscription which provides the message from Arne Saknussemm.
The professor, who is not supernaturally intelligent or "eccentric" (he’s a bit rude, but he’s human), writes to some of his contemporaries who are authorities on certain matters relevant to his forthcoming expedition, and he gets stabbed in the back by the main one, Professor Göteborg, who intends to take the glory of discovery for himself. Having figured that out, Professor Lindenbrook leaves immediately for Iceland, and Alec volunteers to accompany him.
In Iceland, they are abducted and displaced by an agent of Professor Göteborg who is determined to keep them out of his way, and it’s through this predicament they meet Hans Belker and his duck, Gertrude. With the help of both Hans and Gertrude, they escape and return to tell Professor Göteborg the whatfor, only he’s dead in his hotel room, murdered by his last guest: Count Saknussemm, a descendent of the legendary scientist. Professor Göteborg’s widow shows up to meet her husband, is informed of his death, is insulted by Professor Lindenbrook’s expedition “stealing” from her husband, and ends up realizing her husband was a villain. After that, she resolves to accompany Professor Lindenbrook, unwanted, but in the useful role of translator between the party and Hans, who only speaks Icelandic.
Now our cast is all accounted for and they descend into the earth, stalked by Count Saknussemm, who believes this discovery is his birthright.
From the very beginning of their journey, they face perils and have a lurking, unknown enemy. Alec, like his book counterpart, gets separated from the group and nearly dies before encountering Count Saknussemm and, shortly, his own party. When they reach the underground ocean (which, in this version, is the center of the earth), they have a frightening encounter with dimetrodons before making it to the water. Then they discover the ruins of the lost city of Atlantis, another lethal lizard, and then they’re blasted out of a volcano.
Comparing and Contrasting
Historical Context
Allow me to pause a moment to draw attention to one, immediate shift: Germany versus Scotland. It seemed superficial to me, so I was curious, when my dad drew my attention to the date of the movie, where WWII would have been recent history. That explanation made a lot of sense to me. Shifting it to Scotland, who were certainly on better terms with England, anyhow, makes sense when you’re not on great terms with a certain country for reasons. I couldn’t find anything conclusive (or at all) on this point when I researched, aside from a mention from the screenwriter that he changed the location to Scotland, but no motivation for the change was given. I’m content to call what I’ve mentioned a convincing theory, if nothing else.
Different, Not Bad
My summaries of both properties were speedruns of the plot and didn’t do full justice to imagery, which is really, really important when you’re talking about a visual medium and what parts to adapt from a non-visual medium.
There is imagery in the book. When I made the claim that it was dull and sciencey, not a feast for the mind’s eye, I didn’t mean there was no imagery at all.
The underground ocean is lit with sun-like brilliance by a constant aurora.
They encounter a storm with a mischievous ball of electricity that seems to play with the supplies on their raft.
An ichthyosaur and plesiosaur have a smackdown.
They fish for ugly, blind sturgeons.
They find forests (though they’re not green, because there’s no sunlight) and a mushroom forest.
They see a lot of bones but also spot a herd of living mastodons in one of the forests, quite possibly shepherded by a living, giant man.
All of these things are there and perfectly fine, but this portion of their expedition doesn’t happen until the last third of the book, which means, if adapted literally, the first two-thirds of the movie would be utter blackness and silence, because the echoes make it impossible to hear each other. Then they’d finally reach a part you could see with some neat elements, and then it’s over. And that combines with the sciencey interest of the visuals, such as finding a preserved corpse with hollow eye sockets in a boneyard. And, as mentioned before, dead-looking forests.
Do those visuals really, truly inspire awe and wonder? Do I want to pay to see characters not interact with each other? Do I want a survival documentary where the only dangers are running out of food and water or breaking a lantern? Do I want the corpse with hollow eyes?
I’ll admit it is possible for my answer to be at least slightly colored by nostalgia, but my personal answer to those questions is ‘No.’
The movie has earthquakes, fragile rock formations, and a stalker-enemy who all provide tension and thrill to the journey. The characters sing to keep their spirits up and exchange snappy dialogue (there are some really strong exchanges between the professor and Madame Göteborg). They marvel at shining, crystal caverns, and they’ve got frightful, reptilian foes that are a wonder of green-screen technology (I say this only a little facetiously. It does have a slight cheese factor, but it’s creative, and I love it). Heck, you guys, they’ve got Gertrude.
One point I will bring up is that Axel is intelligent and sciencey in his own right, compared to his Uncle Lidenbrock. He’s a thinker and anxious for it, which is what adds color to the colorless journey of the book. Alec—the Axel substitute of the movie—is not intelligent or sciencey. It’s painful at times. That is one change that could have been made stronger.
Bonus Content: Journey to the Center of the Earth (2008)
I did promise I’d give a mention to the 2008 Journey to the Center of the Earth starring Brendan Fraser, so here we are.
Summary
Seismology professor Trevor Anderson babysits his teenage nephew, Sean, and his sister-in-law gives him a box of things that used to belong to his deceased brother (Sean's dad) who disappeared ten years prior. In that box, he finds Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth with all kinds of notes scrawled in it, some of which prompt him to return to his lab and look at his seismic maps again and find there’s a new tracking blip on the computer screen, fully corresponding with whatever activity his brother was tracking a whole decade ago.
Taking his impertinent nephew with him, he immediately embarks for Iceland in search of a scientist mentioned in his brother’s notes and instead finds the scientist’s young and attractive daughter, Hannah, who happens to be a mountain guide. The next day, they set off for the mountain marked by the tracking blip and get trapped in a cave after lightning strikes the mouth and causes a landslide.
From that point on, a roller coaster-like mine cart ride takes them further away from the surface than they anticipated, then they walk on thin rock that breaks and sends them hurtling down a pit onto a waterslide. The combination leads them straight to the center of the earth in a matter of hours, at most. The center is an ocean, with lush, green foliage around the shore, and a ball of gas lighting it perpetually.
There are bioluminescent birds, and they discover the corpse of Trevor’s brother, as well as his journal which informs them they only have 48 hours to escape or they’ll be cooked. So they set sail on the ocean, play baseball with sharp-toothed fish, narrowly escape giant dinosaur-like creatures that emerge from the water and eat the fish, and then Sean gets separated when he gets carried into the air on the sail. Trevor and Hannah encounter some sentient Venus fly traps, while Sean is guided by a glowing bird through a cavern of floating, magnetic rocks and then is chased by an unusually stealthy and perceptive giganotosaurus. (Seriously, the giganotosaurus hides on a rock above Sean and graciously waits for him to notice before striking more like a mountain lion than a predatory dinosaur.)
In order to get out, they have to make it to a geyser that will shoot them back up to the surface, but they’re too late, and the water has dried up, so they have to ignite magnesium to explode the walls so the water will spill through. And that’s the end.
Analysis
Though my younger brother likes to refer to this movie as, and I quote, a “Masterpiece,” (and screaming while falling, then stopping to talk about it, then screaming again as, and I quote, “Character development.”) I have to relay the honest truth: this is an unintelligent movie. The CGI is bad, the dialogue is bad, the story is weak all the way through. There’s a sub-/bookend plot where Trevor’s lab—which is named after his brother—is being defunded and he’s able to stop that from happening thanks to pure, rare gems Sean pilfered from their time underground, but that subplot is not fleshed out. The movie isn’t concerned with any kind of development apart from, “Isn’t this thing cool?” and maybe that would be alright, in its own way, if “cool” weren’t relying heavily on special effects less convincing than the green-screened iguanas from 1959.
Cool storytelling and intelligent storytelling are not mutually exclusive. That’s assuming anyone older than twelve finds this movie cool in the first place. In which case, it may be neither cool nor intelligent. So I’m sorry to anyone who grew up with this movie and has any nostalgia, but it’s not good. It was barely watchable.
Final Thoughts
Have you read Journey to the Centre of the Earth? Have you seen the 1959 or 2008 movies? Let me know your thoughts, favorite parts, etc. in the comments!
If you haven’t read the book but you like reading, I’d encourage you to give it a shot! It’s very thinky. If you haven’t seen the 1959 movie, I’d encourage you to give that a watch, too. And if you haven’t seen the 2008 movie, don’t even worry about it, you’re not missing out.
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