If you missed Walden Media’s and New Line Cinema’s Journey to the Center of the Earth in theaters, you can now pick up the DVD and enjoy some anaglyph stereoscopic fun at home. The Brendan Fraser family flick comes packaged with four pairs of 3-D glasses, as does a new 3-D version of the Warner Bros. animated holiday favorite The Polar Express. Both films are available today on DVD and Blu-ray.
Co-starring Josh Hutcherson and Anita Briem, Journey casts Fraser as a scientist who takes his nephew and a mountain guide on an expedition to a prehistoric lost world at the Earth’s core. In this modernized adaptation of the Jules Verne literary classic, the scientist believes that Verne actually made such a trip and left his original manuscript as a map to the fantastic, subterranean environment. Since so much of the production leaned on pixel wizardry, New Line and Walden tapped Academy Award-winning visual effects supervisor Eric Brevig (The Island, The Day After Tomorrow, Pearl Harbor) to make his directorial debut.
The Journey DVD also contains a standard 2-D version of the movie. Extras include commentary by Fraser and Brevig, and the featurette A World Within Our World: Various Historical ‘Hollow Earth’ Theories About What Lies Beneath Our Planet’s Crust. There’s also a profile of Hutcherson, Fraser’s 12-year-old costar, and an interactive Adventure at the Center of the Earth challenge.
The Polar Express 3-D offers fans of the movie a new way to enjoy the performance-capture holiday fable at home. Chris Van Allsburg’s story of a doubting boy who takes a magical trip to Santa’s North Pole pops off the screen with the talents of director/producer Robert Zemeckis and star Tom Hanks. Bonus features include ‘Smokey and Steamer,’ a song not seen in theaters, and the featurettes You Look Familiar: The Many Polar Faces of Tom Hanks, A Genuine Ticket to Ride and True Inspirations: Profiling Author Chris Van Allsburg. There’s also a performance of ‘Believe’ by Josh Groban and a behind-the-scenes look at five motion-capture sessions.
Those who prefer to focus on the holiday at hand can enjoy some animated chills with Dead Space: Downfall. Hitting retail just in time for Halloween, the Starz Media production is based on Electronic Arts’ Dead Space video-game, which arrived in stores earlier this month. In the gory animated film, an ancient religious artifact recovered by a deep-space mining ship plagues the crew by turning them into blood-thirsty creatures. Extras include a deleted scene, and a cheat sheet for the EA game. The Anchor Bay release is available on DVD and Blu-ray.
