Josh Hutcherson and Michael Caine
While the net was initially abuzz about Brendan Fraser’s absence from this installment of the Jules Verne franchise, the casting re-jig for Warner Bros & Walden Media’s 2011 tentpole may well be a blessing in disguise. Fraser hasn’t brought anything approaching freshness to his audiences since 1999’s The Mummy, and 2010’s Furry Vengeance might have marked the expiration of the actor’s use-by date.
Journey 2: The Mysterious Island passes the baton of interest in all things Jules Verne to Josh Hutcherson’s science-minded character, Sean Anderson. Sean’s voyage sets sail when he receives a distress signal from an island not in existence on any map. Accompanied by his stepdad, Hank Parsons (Dwayne Johnson), a chopper pilot (Luis Guzman) and the pilot’s daughter (Vanessa Hudgens), Sean sets out to rescue the island’s lone inhabitant (turns out it’s his grandfather, played by Michael Caine), and escape the island on the Nautilus ship before it sinks beneath the seas forever.
Seven weeks into their principal shooting schedule, the studio brought a group of reporters to the less mysterious island of Oahu, where shooting took place for two months on external sets before production shifted in January 2011 to water tanks and other stages in Wilmington, North Carolina.
It was a hotbed of production activity in Hawaii, with Shonda Rhimes’s “Off the Map” and CBS’s “Hawaii Five-O” shooting contemporaneously to Journey, and the fourth installment of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise having recently wrapped.
Up at Waimea Falls on the phenomenally pretty north side of the island (a location made more famous by the airplane accident in “Lost”), the set sits amidst a national park unrestricted to wandering hikers and curious tourists. Johnson, Caine, Hutcherson, Hudgens and Guzman are hard at work negotiating fields of (real) six-foot high fiberglass flowers, (virtual) volcanoes of gold lava, and an every-15-minute tropical shower from which there’s no hiding.
Planted towards the end of Journey to the Center of the Earth, fans would have seen a subtle allusion to Verne’s lost city of Atlantis marking the studio’s eye for a sequel – so, where and what exactly is this “mysterious island?” What we do know is that the island doesn’t exist on any map, and that this is a place where natural selection has taken a bizarre turn – what’s usually small is large (butterflies, flower blooms and bumblebees), and vice versa.
The bumblebees were an especially attractive lure to six-time Academy Award nominee (and two-time Oscar recipient) Caine:
“I now have three brand new grandchildren and I wanted to do a family film. I’ve done adventure films, but not for small children. This is really fantasy, this afternoon we’re riding around on bumblebees. My grandson’s gonna say to his friends, ‘Can your granddad do that?’ ‘No, he can’t.’”
It’s clear the cast is partaking in the “Mahalo” vibe that Hawaii mandates. While we’re chatting with Caine, he gets a big kiss from Johnson; and, in between takes, Hutcherson and Hudgens are full of laughter (and singing) merely to entertain each other. And Guzman’s rapport with director, Brad Peyton, is imbued with scene-stealing improvisation.
So, what do the actors do in their down time while filming on the island?
Caine professed himself to be “one of the biggest film fans in the world. I always see movies. I’ve just seen Burlesque in the theater, and I saw Dwayne’s movie [Faster], and then I saw Love and Other Drugs.” Seriously, can you imagine catching a movie on a rainy day in Honolulu and the guy munching on Milk Duds next to you is Batman’s butler?
Hutcherson, the only remaining cast member from The Journey to the Center of the Earth, is more inclined to keep it simple. Owing to Hawaii’s quarantine regulations, he can’t bring his dog to set, as he has done previously, but admits to having caught Jackass 3D at the local cinemas. Primarily, though, it’s about the surf: “a surfboard and swim trunks is all I need out here. My suitcase was five board shorts and five T-shirts, and I just mix and match the entire time. That’s all I wear. I’ve got a house on the beach, and I come home from work and go have a swim in the ocean, and I surf in the morning. It’s really nice.”
Hudgens, too, enjoys the occasional outing. Often subjected to the lenses of paparazzi cameras, the actress admits, “Sometimes it’s ‘Okay, I want to have my normal life and go to the movies and put a pair of jeans on.’ I’m getting really good at dressing down; I have a really good hat collection.”
Of course, for Johnson, the return to Hawaii is a little more meaningful. “I lived here on two occasions, did a lot of my growing up here, so those years were important. Those early teenage years I was here, I was getting in trouble and doing a lot of dreaming – to come back and live the dream, so to speak, is pretty cool.”
Luis Guzman rolled onto Journey 2 after wrapping Arthur with Russell Brand in New York. Despite his more than a hundred credits, Guzman is less familiar to mainstream audiences than fans of cult cinema, and Guzman admitted that he’d just watched his role in P.T. Anderson’s classic Boogie Nights with his oldest daughter for the first time.
As for 3D, the format has come a long way since the first Journey in 2008, which, it should be noted, was the first live-action, narrative motion picture to be shot in digital 3D. While James Cameron spent more than a month on the set of that film figuring things out for his monumental Avatar, Journey 2’s young director, Brad Peyton, and his team are able to watch Sony’s 3D 24” television monitors on set with the same Real D 3D glasses we’re all given on our way into a theater. The ability to watch the film’s takes in 3D as they’re shot is a huge advantage to the filmmakers, for whom 3D is no longer merely a tool to wow an audience but an implement able to enforce the viewer’s ride into the story itself. Inspired by the Lucas/Spielberg films of his youth and by the Burton-esque sensitivities discovered in his adolescence, Peyton goes around showing his cast animated sequences on an iPad.
Despite the tall flowers and huge bumblebees, films like Journey 2: The Mysterious Island may well be the virtual reality dreams of our current cinematic age. And with a cast adorned with billion dollar smiles and Oscar statuettes -- what’s not to love?
Send feedback on this column to
editorial@fandango.com.