Journey 2: The Mysterious Island by Brad Peyton on Blu-ray
My rating: 7 out of 10 stars
The 17-year-old Sean Anderson receives a coded signal and his stepfather Hank helps him to decipher the message. They find that Sean’s grandfather Alexander Anderson has found the mysterious island in the Pacific described by Jules Verne and two other writers in their novels. The stubborn Sean wants to travel to the coordinates and Hank decides to buy the tickets and travel with the teenager to a small island nearby the location. They rent an old helicopter owned by the locals Gabato and his teenage daughter Kailani and the group heads to the unknown spot. Along their journey, they cross a hurricane and crash in the island. They find a beautiful and dangerous place, surrounded by forests, volcanoes with lava of gold and menacing life forms. The meet also the old Alexander and Hank discovers that the island is sinking. Now their only chance to survive is to find the legendary Nautilus.
This movie is presented as a sequel to a Journey to the Center of the Earth. The connection to the previous movie is rather loose though. It is also rather loosely connected to Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island. I was not very pleased with the Journey to the Center of the Earth remake from 2008. This one I found to be a quite nice family movie. We got it because my youngest son put it on his Christmas wish list and yesterday the entire family watched it. That was the first time for me but the second time for my son.
The movie is a nice mix of humour, adventure and action. It does not pretend to be anything else than an entertaining family movie and in that it succeeds quite well. We watched it in 2D since we do not have 3D equipment (and I feel no real urge to get 3D either) and, even though there where scenes that where clearly made for showing of 3D effects, they were not as intrusive as in the prequel. The movie was quite enjoyable also in 2D.
Special effects where acceptable for a family movie and the scenery was not at all bad. Dwayne Johnson will not win an Oscar but the acting was good enough. Sure, there were some silly parts but on the whole the movie was quite enjoyable.
As I wrote, a quite nice family movie.
PG's Ramblings 