This ADD adventure for boys sports 13-year-old Sean (Josh Hutcherson), his geologist uncle Trevor (Brendan Fraser) and their hot Icelandic guide Hannah (Anita Briem) on an action ride. It’s an overnight roundtrip to and from the underworld where Trevor’s brother disappeared ten years ago. Visual effects supervisor Eric Brevig (“Men in Black” and “Pearl Harbor”) makes his feature debut with kid-friendly digital 3-D effects: a yo-yo, a tape measure, spit and dino-drool are among the images that leap out of the screen. The depth-free screenplay by Michael Weiss and Jennifer Flackett & Mark Levin adapts Jules Verne’s 1864 fantasy about a two-month trek by a German geologist, his nephew and their Icelandic guide Hans. Verne dropped the names of scientific worthies of his era, such as Blumenbach, Cuvier and Davy. Likewise, “At the Earth’s Core”—Edgar Rice Burroughs’ 1914 tale about a ten-year adventure in a land where a reptilian master race used a “sixth-sense fourth-dimensional language”—lists such beasts as labyrinthodon, plesiosaur and ramphorhynchus. But this film’s dumbed-down notion of scientific literacy is one mention of Scientific American magazine. If you’re counting qualified firsts, this is billed as “the first live-action, narrative motion picture to be shot in digital 3D.” (Bill Stamets)
