JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH

Action adventure

PRINCIPAL CAST MEMBERS
Brendan Frasier: Professor Trevor Anderson
Josh Hutcherson: his 13-year-old nephew Sean
Anita Briem: mountain guide Hannah Ásgeirsson

REVIEW
Summer time brings warm weather, lovely bright days and lightweight inconsequential movies that requires no more of us than to sit there and be entertained. This is one of them.

For an hour and half we are taken along on a ride from one crisis situation to another. But the parties involved don’t seem to feel the sense of doom and handle each problem with aplomb and adeptness few of us have mastered.

As would be expected the special effects are first rate. But the rest of the movie is not.

CLASSIFICATION
for intense adventure action and some scary moments (particularly in the 3D version).

FOR NITPICKERS ONLY
 When I visited the country a couple of years ago, I learned that Iceland is the only remaining patronymic society in the world whereby a person’s last name is based on the first name of his or her father. For example the offspring of Pétur Marteinsson would have different last names: his son’s last name would be Pétursson (the son of Pétur) and his daughter’s last name would be Pétursdóttir (the daughter of Pétur). So someone named Hannah Ásgeirsson would be the son of Ásgeir and Hanna definitely is not a man.
 An initially stationary object, which is allowed to fall freely under gravity, drops a distance that is proportional to the square of the elapsed time. Expressed mathematically then for time t the distance travelled d = ½gt2 where g is the gravitational constant of 32 feet per second per second. The flare dropped by Trevor took 3 seconds to hit the object below. He tells the others that is 200’ below them whereas it is only 144’ based on the above formula.
 Then the professor compounds his error by saying, “That’s equivalent to a 26 story building”. GPS analysis of downtown high-rise buildings indicates that, on average, the ground floor of a building is 15’ high and each floor above is 13’ high. So a 26 story building would be 15’ + 325’ = 340’ high not 200’. Even in a city with a low-height limit such as Washington D.C. it would be 65’ higher than his 200’.

P.S.
5000 Iceland Kronur is worth approximatly $65.