Imitation Jules

On March 9, 1886, poor, deranged Gaston Verne shot his uncle Jules, the French writer often credited with the invention of science fiction. The great man survived, but if he’d known what filmmakers would do with his books in the centuries to follow, he probably would have reached for that revolver himself.The latest movie to spring from Verne’s pages, “Journey to the Center of the Earth,” may turn out far better than what has come before, but the precedents are not encouraging. Previous “Journeys” — no fewer than five television projects and four feature films have worn the name — have been more trudge than adventure, despite attempts to boost the novel’s sometimes leaden pace with additional love interests, murderous rivalries, a martyred duck, a massive ape, humanoid dinosaurs, sexy primeval girls, noble Maori rebels, gunrunning, and, in a confusing 1989 version that doubled as a sequel to “Alien From L.A.,” Kathy Ireland.The idea that Verne’s fanciful stories are, by themselves, no longer enough to draw a crowd can be detected in many of the films that have been made of his work. The two best-known versions of Verne’s 1874 novel, “The Mysterious Island,” added giant animals into the mix, and one of them also threw in a giant bomb just to make sure. Disney’s simpering, sickly “In Search of the Castaways” (1962) hit the rocks when an aging Maurice Chevalier broke into saccharine song.On the other hand, if we avert our eyes from the grotesque blend of martial arts, slapstick, and ham that was Hollywood’s most recent take on “Around the World in 80 Days” (with Jackie Chan as Passepartout), Phileas Fogg’s legendary circumnavigation has been treated relatively kindly, notably in its 1956 retelling starring David Niven. Notwithstanding a balloon transplanted from an earlier Verne novel, this effort stuck fairly closely to the original story line and offered its audience a spectacle that the old Frenchman, a man fully in touch with his inner Barnum, would have relished.Verne would also have been intrigued by the way “Around the World” was enriched by the nostalgia with which it is saturated. Just 11 years after Hiroshima, it depicted the mid-Victorian world as a gentle, almost prelapsarian place, its disorders more antic than dangerous, its inventions amusingly retro contraptions. Similarly, and ironically, Fogg’s hectic dash had been transformed by time and technology into a symbol of a leisured era, into something that now seems almost stately. Understanding the implications of these changes in perception helps explain those added dinosaurs, karate kicks, and Maoris: Many of the wonders chronicled by Verne are, nowadays, anything but. Making the filmmakers’ task more difficult still, the characters created by this most Joe Friday of novelists are, more often than not, cutouts, sketches, and caricatures. The most worthwhile exception is, of course, Captain Nemo, that enigmatic specter of alienation, vengeance, and the utopian violence of the century to come. The captain has benefited from compelling performances by some of cinema’s finest, including James Mason (the most convincing Nemo of all), Michael Caine, Herbert Lom, and, appropriately, another captain, the Starship Enterprise’s Picard (Patrick Stewart).But if Nemo has fared well at the movies, the same cannot be said of his lonely odyssey. Neither Mr. Lom nor Mr. Stewart managed to extricate his respective “Mysterious Island” film (the former in 1961, the latter in 2005) from the wreckage of its screenplay, while even the best “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” project (the Walt Disney version from 1954, with Mason) modified, sweetened, and dumbed down Verne’s original in a way that sapped much of its power. That said, it is one of its rivals — the Michael Caine film, one of two made-for-TV versions of this story produced in 1997 — that may indicate the best way forward for renderings of Verne. The narrative, bloated by a bitter father-son rivalry, a romance with the girlfriend from “Ferris Bueller” (Nemo’s daughter, remarkably), and, yes, the resettling of Atlantis, is the usual Verne movie shambles. But the film’s evocative, almost steampunk aesthetic — an exhilarating blend of brass, iron, pumps, and valves, of William Morris, satanic mills, and a science that never quite emerged — is not.Verne’s future may, in one sense, be behind us, but as an alternative reality, or as an imagined universe of (to borrow William Golding’s lovely phrase) “astronauts by gaslight,” it still has the potential to enchant. There are glimpses of how this could be in Captain Nemo’s appearance in Alan Moore’s graphic novel “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,” but Verne’s stories themselves still await such treatment.

Imitation Jules

Imitation Jules

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