Gurney to the Centaur of the Girth

This last weekend I went to see "Journey to the Center of the Earth" in 3-D at our local movie theatre. My experience with this film was... weird, intense, disappointing, and difficult. Imagine being unrelentingly visually stimuli zed in the most profoundly unnecessary, mind blowing ways, by the worst writing and acting you've seen, maybe ever. This film was very awkward to me. The 3-D visuals could be mind blowingly intense, but felt very cheap and almost dirty at times. I guess I’m trying to say that the movie relied very heavily on cheap 3-D thrills and very little on anything else. The plot was disappointingly predictable and the writing was... painful. It hurt to watch Brendan Fraser. The sound in this movie was a lot like the father of the young boy protagonist. It died some time before the movie started. I feel like the sound editing for this movie was completed in a day or two. For what they had to show, if it took any longer the sound guys were just wasting their time. That might be unfair to say, its understandable that they could have been rushed or over budget, but my twelve dollar ticket was over budget and i was expecting a little more. As a sound and cinema student, I spent the majority of the movie straining for some kind of innovative or at least remotely interesting audio experience but found nothing. There was the sound of the actors voices (which could have been dubbed over with electronic trance music, and the movie would have been way better, in my opinion.) Then there was the "suspenseful" orchestral action music, I would explain it further, but you have heard the same score hundreds of times, there is no need. As far as diagetic sound, there was surprisingly little more than what I would consider the bare minimum. Footsteps made noise occasionally and the T-Rex was really loud, I remember that. Getting back to the subject of their disregard for creative license, a T-Rex? Come on people. How many times have we done the T-Rex? I don’t even think I'm afraid of the T-Rex anymore. Apparently it can only run, almost as fast as Brendan Fraser. I would have liked to see some raptors perhaps. With some real spooky non-diagetic raptor noises, creeping around off-screen. Where is Spielberg when you need him? On second thought, Raptors in 3-D might not be a good idea. Nobody would go to that movie, out of fear. I’m not sad that I watched this move, I’m sad that somebody worked really hard on this movie. There is no doubt that my eyes were visually molested, and I can’t deny that I liked it just a little. But my ears seemed forgotten, as if the director didn’t love them. This made me sad as well. I did score some sweet 3-D glasses though ("score"/ "run out the door with"). I was hoping that outside the theatre they would see in four dimensions, no such luck. I also left the theatre with some very interesting questions.

1. Does a 3-D movie require more of sound in order to satisfy?
2. What type of sound techniques exist or could come to exist because of this genre? (diffusion, radial spatialization)
3. Do people think Brendan Fraser is a good actor?
4. And finally, is Jules Verne Spinning clockwise or counter clockwise, in his grave? Keep in mind that magnetic polarity is reverse in the center of the earth.