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Journey to the Center of the Earth

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Brief Synopsis

Cast & crew, henry levin, james mason, arlene dahl, diane baker, thayer david, photos & videos, technical specs.

In Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1880, Professor Oliver Lindenbrook is knighted to the acclaim of his colleagues and students. When his prize pupil, Alec McEwen, presents him with a lava paperweight to commemorate the occasion, Oliver discovers that encased within the Italian lava is a rock from Iceland, halfway across the world from the volcano. After Oliver identifies some etchings on the rock as those of Saknussemm, an Icelandic scientist who years earlier descended into the interior of the earth, never to return, he sends a dispatch to his colleague, Prof. Goetaborg in Stockholm, asking him to confirm his findings. Upon learning that Goetaborg has vanished, Oliver realizes that the Swede has decided to conduct his own expedition. Now in a race to reach the center of the earth, Oliver and Alec leave immediately for Iceland and Alec bids farewell to his fiancée Jenny, Oliver's niece. Aware that they must begin their descent on the last day of May when the sunrise will pinpoint the opening into the Earth, Oliver hurries to assemble the equipment needed for his journey, but soon learns that it has all been purchased by Goetaborg. When he goes to confront Goetaborg about the situation, Oliver discovers the Swede lying lifeless in his hotel room, poisoned. Soon after, Goetaborg's wife Carla arrives to join her husband. Oliver breaks the news of her husband's death, but when he requests the use of the equipment, Carla agrees on the condition that she be allowed to join the expedition. With no other choice, Oliver reluctantly accepts, and the three are then joined by a husky Icelandic jack-of-all trades named Hans Belker and his pet duck Gertrude. As they slip inside the Earth on the last day of May, they are secretly followed by Count Saknussemm, a descendent of the original explorer. Their first trial occurs when a boulder, dislodged by an earthquake, tumbles threateningly toward them. After a narrow escape, they discern a series of notches left by Saknussemm, marking the path to the center of the Earth. Unknown to them, the count has sabotaged his ancestor's markings, sending Alec over the side of a precipice. After Hans rescues Alec, Carla uncovers the real markings, and they realize they have been tricked. Becoming separated from the rest when he follows a tunnel, Alec sinks through a bed of salt into a chamber, where he comes face to face with the count. When Alex refuses to carry the count's equipment, the count shoots at him, and the sound of gunfire alerts the others to their whereabouts. Following the echoing gunshots, the three soon find the wounded Alec and the count, who threatens them all at gunpoint. After Oliver tricks the count by throwing salt in his eyes, they accuse him of murdering Goetaborg and find him guilty in a mock trial. Although he is sentenced to die, the three find themselves unable to carry out the sentence. The Count then begrudgingly joins the expedition, and as their lamps begin to fail, he discovers a luminescent algae that renders artificial light unnecessary. Two hundred fifty six days later, Carla and Oliver are still bickering about the journey. When Alec discovers a massive mushroom forest, Carla prepares the mushrooms for dinner while the count orders Hans to chop the plants down to build a raft that will carry them across the ocean of the underworld. Just as they are about to set sail, an army of giant flesh-eating lizards appear, but they escape by fleeing into the water. Once at sea, they are encompassed by a magnetic force field which Oliver realizes is the center of the Earth, whose intense centrifugal force throws them onto shore, exhausted. As they sleep, Gertrude waddles off, and when Hans awakens, all he finds is a pile of bloody feathers. Realizing that the count has eaten Gertrude for dinner, Hans lunges at him, and when the count retreats, he is crushed by a falling pillar of rocks. The collapse reveals the sunken city of Atlantis, where they find the skeleton of Saknussemm, his finger pointing to a shaft that leads to the chimney of a volcano in Stromboli, Italy, the way out of the underground. Oliver sends Hans to inspect the shaft, and when Hans reports that it is obstructed by a giant block of stone, Oliver decides to dislodge the obstruction by using a cache of gunpowder found in Saknussemm's knapsack. The group takes refuge from the explosion in a giant asbestos chalice, but when the gunpowder fails to ignite, Oliver jumps down to relight it and is attacked by a giant scorpion. Escaping with Alec's help, Oliver climbs back into the chalice just as the gunpowder detonates, killing the serpent and destroying Atlantis. The chalice and its inhabitants are swept up though the tunnel and spewed out into the sea, where all but Alec, who lands in a tree, are rescued by Italian fishermen. The party then returns triumphant to Edinburgh, where Jenny and Alec are married. When Oliver asks Carla to stay and collaborate with him on his memoirs, she reacts with indignation at being relegated to the role of his secretary until he proposes and embraces her.

Peter Ronson

Robert adler.

Alan Napier

Alex finlayson, frederick halliday, alan caillou, ivan triesault, peter wright, molly roden, edith evanson, owen mcgivney, kendrik huxham, molly glessing, john barclay, peter fontaine, john ainsworth, myra nelson, thomas f. martin, l. b. abbott, franz bachelin, lincoln barnett, herman a. blumenthal, charles brackett, robert burns, charles [g.] clarke, warren b. delaplain, leonard doss, david ffolkes, bernard freericks, stuart gilmore, james b. gordon, bernard herrmann, jack w. holmes, joseph kish, emila kose jr., lionel newman, walter reisch, joseph m. schenck, bernard schwartz, walter m. scott, helen turpin, james van heusen, lyle r. wheeler, photo collections.

Award Nominations

Best art direction, best special effects.

I never sleep. I hate those little slices of death. - Count Saknussem

The screenwriter evidently thought that since English-speaking people can have surnames like London or York then Swedes can be named Goetaborg (Goteborg is the second largest city in Sweden) - which is most unlikely.

The film's title card reads "Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth ." The film closes with the following written acknowledgment: "Carlsbad Caverns National Park served as the background for portions of the motion picture. Twentieth Century-Fox expresses its appreciation for the cooperation extended by the National Park Service of the U.S. Department of the Interior." According to studio publicity contained in the film's production files at the AMPAS Library, filming was allowed only at night because of daily public tours scheduled in the caverns. Location filming was also done in Edinburgh, Scotland; Amboy Crater, CA and Sequit Point, CA.        A number of studios and producers considered filming Verne's novel prior to Twentieth Century-Fox's production. According to December 1955 and February 1956 Los Angeles Times news items, producer Eugene Lourie planned to film a version in Italy with Gerard Philipe and Michele Morgan as the stars. According to September 1956 items in Hollywood Citizen-News and Daily Variety , producer Bryan Foy bought the rights to the novel for release through Columbia, but Columbia withdrew its plans upon learning that RKO had begun extensive pre-production work on the same subject.        In October 1958, a Los Angeles Examiner news item stated that Charles Brackett, in association with Twentieth Century-Fox, had bought the rights to the novel from the Korda estate and wanted Clifton Webb to play the role of "Oliver Lindenbrook." Although an April 1959 Hollywood Reporter news item added that Lincoln Barnett was to write the screenplay for Brackett, Barnett's contribution to the released film has not been determined. According to a March 1959 Hollywood Reporter news item, Cooga Mooga Film Productions was Pat Boone's production company. Under Boone'e deal with Twentieth Century-Fox, Boone was to produce and star in the film for a share in the profits, as well as a salary. Journey to tne Center of the Earth marked Boone's first production. In Verne's novel, the character of Lindenbrook was German. The characters "Carla" and "Saknussemm" were added for the film.        Journey to the Center of the Earth was nominated for the following Academy Awards: Best Art Direction, Best Set Decoration, Best Sound and Best Special Effects. Modern sources add that Anna Jane Sitton worked as Arlene Dahl's stand-in and that Alexander Scourby was orginally cast as Saknussemm. According to modern sources, Pat Boone wrote and recorded a theme song that was never used in the film.        Verne's novel has been filmed several other times. In 1976, Almena Films, a Spanish company, released Viaje al centro de la Tierra , starring Kenneth More and directed by Juan Piquer Simón, and in 1989, the Canon Group/Golan-Globus released a version directed by Rusty Lemorande and starring Erno Philips. From 1967-69, ABC television broadcast an animated series loosely based on Verne's novel. Although several new feature film versions of Verne's novel were announced in the early 2000s, none was in production as of spring 2005.

Miscellaneous Notes

Released in United States Winter December 1959

Released in United States on Video August 25, 1988

Released in United States 1998

Shown at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) as part of program "Twentieth Century Fox and the Golden Age of CinemaScope" July 3 - August 15, 1998.

CinemaScope

Released in United States 1998 (Shown at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) as part of program "Twentieth Century Fox and the Golden Age of CinemaScope" July 3 - August 15, 1998.)

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Journey to the Center of the Earth

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Watch Journey to the Center of the Earth with a subscription on Prime Video, or buy it on Prime Video.

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Journey to the center of the earth.

Directed by Scott Wheeler , Davey Jones

A daring rescue mission, to a dangerous new world... underneath ours!

When an accident leaves a group of researchers trapped beneath the earth's crust, it's up to a drill team, led by Joseph Harnet, to rescue them. But once underground, the team discovers a mysterious -- and horrifying -- subterranean universe.

Dedee Pfeiffer Greg Evigan Vanessa Evigan Jennifer Dorogi Sara Tomko Caroline Attwood Leah Grimsson Jason S. Gray Michael Tower Vanessa Mitchell Amelia Jackson-Gray Dylan Diehl Damien Puckler Oliver Rayon

Directors Directors

Scott Wheeler Davey Jones

Producer Producer

Writers writers.

Jules Verne Davey Jones

Releases by Date

01 jul 2008, 14 oct 2008, 11 mar 2009, 22 sep 2009, 22 sep 2011, 04 oct 2011, releases by country.

• Physical 16 DVD

Russian Federation

• Theatrical 15
• Theatrical PG-13 limited

87 mins   More at IMDb TMDb Report this page

Popular reviews

Review by Xplodera ½

I get the idea of The Asylum and their “mockbusters”, to quickly throw together a film to coincide with a big release and hope that the similar title will confuse people. The thing with Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth is that it’s a public domain-story, with a simple premise to just put straight into your film, so why even bother trying to make an original story using this title? I guess Asylum could get come credit for doing something own with the story, but the problem is that it’s so fucking bad that they’d be much better off simply making a straight adaptation of Verne’s story.

I could laugh about the effects here, mock the stilted…

Review by Aaron White ★ 1

Sooooo... LOL

I thought I'd watch something on my laptop tonight while my daughter uses the TV to play the Switch, and looking at my Letterboxd lists I settled on "Journey to the Center of the Earth" with Brendan Fraser. I clicked on the JustWatch link to see if it was streaming. Score! It was available on Hoopla. Clicked the link, borrowed, and started watching. But oops, the Hoopla link was bad and it went to this gem (not a gem) from The Asylum that has the same title and also came out in 2008 (Letterboxd is wrong). In fact, THREE movies with this title came out in 2008!

Anyway, I couldn't look away from this absolute train-wreck. Since none…

Review by Vatsala Jhaveri ★

Jules Verne didn't write one of the most influential science fiction novels of all time for it to be turned into this.

Pros -A kinda hot implied lesbian relationship between the mean (hispanic?) lady and the whiny blonde. Of course that could just be my imagination going wild because I was bored. -Deedee Pfeiffer is pretty cute as a quirky lip-biting scientist with a drilling machine called...get this...DD. -Implies that there are goths working in high places with the U.S. military and that's kinda cool I guess. Goths committing war crimes!

Cons -WRETCHED CGI. -AWFUL lighting and cinematography. There's a scene where they're supposed to be next to lava and it's just hilariously awful looking. -Not enough monsters. Look, if…

Review by BlakeTourville ★

Thought this was going to be the Brendan Fraser one and it wasn't 😭

Review by Gore Blimey ★★★½

No, not the big-budget 3D adventure starring Brendan Fraser – 3 films were released in 2008 with this name. This one was made by The Asylum. Without a big budget. Or 3D. Or even Brendan Fraser.

A group of Hot Female Soldiers are supposed to be beamed to Germany, but somehow get teleported 600km below the Earth’s surface instead (Jules Verne knew about teleporters..?!) In this strangely sunshiny underworld, they run around in skimpy vests, get sweaty, and do battle with dinosaurs and giant comedy spiders.

By coincidence, one of these women has a sister who is a Hot Female Scientist who – as luck would have it – has just invented a big laser burrowing machine thing that can…

Review by FilmFan1970 🎞 🔪 🪓 🔥🌩🧨🔍🔦🪦 ★★

TUBI 🖥 'Journey to the Center of the Earth (Brendan Fraser) Mockbuster' 'THE ASYLUM WATCH #103' "Familiar Face Dedee Pfeiffer"

Not as bad as I had heard but still not good, Dedee Pfeiffer saved it for me as Emily Radford who's drilling machine drills down to save a team transported to the centre ofvthe eart by mistake, into a band with Dinosaurs and giant spiders, not enough Dinosaurs tho only in one scene and it looked terrible, not much happens and why is there daylight and blue skies where they are? The drilling scenes were the best part of the film and actually looked OK. Not that goid just ok.

Review by Kai ★

Review by Tom Morton ★★½

After reading this five-star review by Bunkerwelt , I couldn't resist giving this one a watch. While I lack the required knowledge of The Asylum's rich body of work to put this into context, I can see the appeal; while I didn't love the film as a whole, it's got a fine sense of action and nonsense.

The scenario is an entertainingly stupid one - a group of heavily armed young women are preparing to teleport to Stuttgart, for REASONS UNKNOWN, but the teleport machine (a dark room, with some tape on the floor) malfunctions and flings them 600km below the surface of the Earth, to an unexplored gap deep underground which looks inexplicably like a big park, sky filled with…

Review by FritziSchach ★½

Ein recht früher The Asylum-Mockbuster, der sich im Englischen noch wie der Blockbuster nennen durfte und auch im Deutschen mit der Fortsetzung aus 2012 verwechselt werden dürfte. Auch basiert dieser Film immerhin noch ganz lose auf dem Original von Jules Verne. 4 junge Damen sind nach einer Fehlfunktion eines Teleporters in der Mitte der Erde gefangen, inklusive richtig billig aussehenden Dinosauriern und Lavaströme. Danach gibt es 2 halbwegs miteinander verknüpfte Parallelhandlungen. Beide kann man sich einzeln deutlich unterhaltsamer und mit besseren Effekten anschauen, so mit dem 2002er Arac Attack und dem 2003er The Core, der im Vergleich hierzu wie ein guter Film wirkt. Trotzdem muss man sagen, dass The Asylum es auch schon deutlich schlechter hinbekommen hat. 25/100

Review by DER Schmidt ★

So so, das ist also ein Mockbuster! Eine Low-Budget-Produktion. Hier ist einfach alles billig! Aber an schlimmsten ist die Stimmungsmusik - und die Synchronisierung - und die Dramaturgie - und die Schauspieler - und ... Ein würdiger Kandidat für SchleFaZ. Tatsächlich fehlen mir die beißenden SchleFaZ-Kommentare.

Review by mathilde ★

merci nanarTV pour ce bon gros navet

Review by GoofySnacks ★★★

Dedee Pfeifer is so fucking sexy.

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‘Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes’ Review: Hail, Caesar

The latest installment in an excellent series finds mythology turning into power.

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‘Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes’ | Anatomy of a Scene

The director wes ball narrates a sequence from his film..

I’m Wes Ball, director of “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes.” This is a little sequence in the very beginning of the movie after our trio of apes here, Noa, Soona and Anaya, have just had a little adventure and they’re on their way back to their village, where we get to meet the life of Eagle Clan and where Noa and his family reside, this little isolated existence. And we get to see the way the apes live in this world with their eagles. And and how this ritual of collecting their egg, which they’re going to raise as companions, which is part of the way the Eagle Clan kind of works in their culture. And the goal was really just to set up a world that was wonderful, that was ultimately going to be forever changed when the course of events leads to Noa’s village being attacked for the most part, everything you see here was actually shot with the actors. We shoot it twice, we shoot it once with the actors and all of their little performance things and the camera movement and everything. So we are shooting a regular movie. It just happens to be that these guys are wearing these kind of strange suits along with the cameras and the dots on their face that captures all the performance. And then I have to go in and then re- duplicate those shots without the apes, which is where I choose. Whatever performance I choose now gets dropped into the scene itself. So this isn’t something where we just kind of animate the characters after the fact. We’re actually on location and they’re there in their digital costumes, essentially, acting out everything you see on camera, with the exception of, say, background action, there’s a group of apes in the background playing what we called monkey ball, and just we did that all on stage. So that’s kind of the beauty of the power of this process, is that we can populate this whole scene with hundreds of apes. But we only needed a handful of apes on set. This is Dar, Noa’s mother, who’s a fantastic character, played by Sara Wiseman, who did a great job. “I knew you would climb well.” “He waits.” And this character of Noa here, you kind start to see this relationship that he has with his father, which is an interesting kind of relationship that I imagine a lot of people could relate to. They don’t know quite how to communicate with each other, but there’s obviously still love there. It’s an interesting process where I can take all these different little elements and layer them all together and stack them into this — what you see is the end result here, this little idyllic community.

By Alissa Wilkinson

For a series with a goofy premise — what if talking apes overthrew humanity — the “Planet of the Apes” universe is uncommonly thoughtful, even insightful. If science fiction situates us in a universe that’s just different enough to slip daring questions past our mental barriers, then the “Apes” movies are among the best examples. That very premise, launched with talking actors in ape costumes in the 1968 film, has given storytellers a lot to chew on, contemplating racism, authoritarianism, police brutality and, in later installments, the upending of human society by a brutal, fast-moving virus. (Oops.)

Those later virus-ridden installments, a trilogy released between 2011 and 2017, are among the series’ best, and well worth revisiting. The newest film, “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes,” picks up exactly where that trilogy left off: with the death of Caesar, the ultrasmart chimpanzee who has led the apes away from what’s left of humanity and into a paradise. (The scene was a direct quotation of the story of Moses leading the Israelites to the Promised Land, but dying before he could set foot there.) The apes honor his memory and vow to keep his teachings, especially the first dictum — “ape not kill ape.” Caesar preached a gospel of peacefulness, loyalty, generosity, nonaggression and care for the earth; unlike the humans, they intend to live in harmony.

The teachings of peaceful prophets, however, tend to be twisted by power-seekers, and apparently this isn’t just a human problem. “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes,” directed by Wes Ball from a screenplay by Josh Friedman, leaps forward almost immediately by “many generations” (years matter less in this post-human world), and the inevitable has happened. The apes have fractured into tribes, while Caesar has passed from historical figure to mythic one, a figure venerated by some and forgotten by most.

That there even was a Caesar is unknown to Noa (Owen Teague), a young chimpanzee whose father, Koro (Neil Sandilands) is leader of his clan and an avid breeder of birds. That clan has its own laws, mostly having to do with how to treat birds’ nests, and that’s all that Noa and his friends Anaya (Travis Jeffery) and Soona (Lydia Peckham) have known.

But then one day tragedy strikes, in the form of an attack on the clan by the soldiers of Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand), the leader of a clan of coastal apes. Noa finds himself alone, searching for his clan, who have been carted away. On his journey Noa meets a human (Freya Allen) who, like the other humans, doesn’t speak.

At this point in the evolution of the virus, mutations have rendered any surviving humanity speechless and dull-witted, living in roving bands and running from predators; to the apes it’s as preposterous to imagine a talking human as a talking ape is to us. But he also meets Raka (Peter Macon), who believes himself to be the last of the faithful followers of Caesar’s peaceful teachings, even wearing Caesar’s diamond-shaped symbol around his neck. (Eagle-eyed viewers will recall that the symbol echoes the shape of the window in the room in which Caesar was raised as a baby.) Noa learns from Raka. And when he finds what he’s looking for, he realizes he has an important job to do.

“Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” is not quite as transporting as the previous trilogy, perhaps because the apes now act so much like humans that the fruitful dissonance in our minds has mostly been mitigated. It’s simpler to imagine the apes as just stand-in humans when they’re all talking, and thus easier to just imagine you’re watching, say, “The Lion King” or something.

But there’s still a tremendous amount to mull over here, like Proximus Caesar, who borrows the idea of Caesar to prop up his own version of leadership. The real Caesar was undoubtedly strong and brave, but Proximus Caesar has mutated this into swagger and shows of force, an aggression designed to keep his apes in line. He is not brutal, exactly; He is simply insistently powerful and more than a bit of a fascist. Every morning, he greets his subjects by proclaiming that it is a “wonderful day,” and that he is Caesar’s rightful heir, and that they must all work together as one to build their civilization ever stronger.

Visual cues indicate that Proximus Caesar’s kingdom is modeled partly on the Roman Empire, with its colonizing influence and its intention to sweep the riches of the ancient human world — its history, its labor, its technology — into its own coffers. By telling his version of Caesar’s legacy, Proximus Caesar makes the apes believe they are part of some mighty, unstoppable force of history.

But of course, history has a habit of repeating itself, whether it’s ancient Rome or Egypt, and in Proximus Caesar’s proclamations one detects a bit of Ozymandias : Look on his works, ye mighty, and despair! “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” is set in the future, but like a lot of science fiction — “Dune,” for instance, or “Battlestar Galactica,” or Walter Miller’s “A Canticle for Leibowitz” — there’s a knowing sense that all this has happened before, and all this will happen again.

That’s what makes “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” powerful, in the end. It probes how the act of co-opting idealisms and converting them to dogmas has occurred many times over. What’s more, it points directly at the immense danger of romanticizing the past, imagining that if we could only reclaim and reframe and resurrect history, our present problems would be solved. Golden ages were rarely actually golden, but history is littered with leaders who tried to make people believe they were anyhow. It’s a great way to make people do their bidding.

There are some hints near the end of “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” of what might be next for the franchise, should it be fated to continue. But the uneasy fun of the series is we already know what happens, eventually; it was right there in the first movie, and the warning it poses remains bleak.

At the start of the 1968 film, the star Charlton Heston explains, “I can’t help thinking somewhere in the universe there has to be something better than man.” You might have expected, from a movie like this, that “better” species would be these apes. But it turns out we might have to keep looking.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes Rated PG-13, for scenes of peril and woe and a couple of funny, mild swear words. Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes. In theaters.

Alissa Wilkinson is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005. More about Alissa Wilkinson

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