Journey to the Center of the Earth

This is indeed a distinctive variation of Journey to the Centre of the Earth, but the result is not so much due to any creative intention but simply to business calculations. Cannon Films, run by movie enthusiasts and hustlers Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, was famous for, among other things, being the first Hollywood company to introduce and boldly operate the system of pre-selling films to foreign distributors, which today is an entirely common practice in film markets. In practice, this means that a distributor does not buy a film based on seeing the finished work, but as early as in the production or pre-production phase, or even based only on the concept or the cast. On the one hand, this system enables producers to have the essential inflow of the funding needed to complete the given project, but the case of Cannon Films and Journey to the Centre of the Earth clearly illustrates the drawbacks of this system. Cannon received money solely on the basis of the title, but by that time, the company already had major financial problems, so it paradoxically could not afford to make the film for which it had already collected the cash, but at the same time it was contractually obligated to deliver a film called Journey to the Centre of the Earth to distributors. With their kitchen-sink approach, however, the masters killed two birds with one stone. They already had the prepared material for the sequel to Albert Pyun’s bizarre Alien from L.A. project involving an underground dystopia, which was a commercial flop. So they simply took the scenes that had already been shot for this completely different film and hired a new director to shoot a handful of extra inexpensive scenes that serve as an introduction to the resulting film, rooting it in the style of a family farce. The result not only has nothing at all in common with Journey to the Centre of the Earth, but it doesn’t even work as a film in its own right. The attempt to combine the completely bizarre world of Pyun’s Alien from L.A. with a family movie had the consequence that the narrative is absolutely incoherent. Some of the characters simply disappear from the narrative without a trace, some passages that were originally intended to be part of a linear plot in the originally intended sequel are used here only as fragments in the characters’ dreams, key plot motifs remain entirely unresolved, and some passages and individual shots have obvious dubbing and were originally intended to be set in a completely different context. We can draw comparisons with avant-garde and editing-based projects, where the establishment of a new context nullifies the original meaning of the scenes and forms a new meaning, but in practice that doesn’t change the fact that Cannon’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth is a completely incoherent clusterfuck. It is a fascinating relic and a testament to the workings of Cannon Films at the time of its demise, but as a film, it is simply unwatchable. (10/05/2015)