CheerupSilver Very Cool!!!

Fatma Suarez The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Roxie The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

Candida It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

Hitchcoc This is a crazy, delightful mess. Explorers make an effort to go to lands never seen and report back. They try to use every conceivable vehicle to go over mountains, under seas, through outer space, actually visiting the sun (I wonder if they went at night so they wouldn't get burned). There are laughs galore because the stuffed shirt explorers were in no way equipped to do any kind of huge investigation. No matter what horrible things happen to them, getting frozen, blown up, crashing from a hundred miles away, going through the sun, and on and on, they always make their way out. One of the stars of this film is the painted scenery. Melies really liked the jagged edges of the mountains and wacky surreal realms of the outer world.

morrison-dylan-fan Startled by the surreal delights of The Devilish Tenant,I decided to take a look at the other credits from Georges Méliès.Reading IMDb reviews for some of Méliès movies,I found a title which was called a "companion" piece to A Trip To The Moon,which led to me getting ready to go on a voyage.The plot:Making plans to travel to the sun,a group of tech workers decide to use all mode of transportation possible. Going to the Swiss Alps first,the gang soon find out that machines can't be relied upon. View on the film:Tinting the film, actor/director Georges Méliès soaks the movie in a blitz of colour,as smoke pops out in a whirl of colour on the "troubled" adventure to the moon.Along with the splashes of colour, Méliès skilfully brings the various types of transportation to life with a razor sharp mix of live action and animation which wraps the film in a surrealist atmosphere. Returning to Jules Verne for inspiration, Méliès examines Verne's Journey Through the Impossible in an abstract manner. Whilst this approach does allow Méliès to pour out visual flourishes,the lack of any inter-titles over the 20 min run time leads to there being no feeling of build up towards the gang reaching the sun,as they cross the impossible.

des-47 While other film makers were out on location filming locomotives and fire engines or exotic climes, Georges Méliès stayed in his studio in suburban Montreuil, creating ever more elaborate fantasy worlds, more like paintings come to life than moving photographs. In Le voyage à travers l'impossible, trains, submarines and factories are represented by life sized cardboard cutouts. By 1904, audiences must have been aware of the artifice, but it didn't matter, as the events depicted were sheer comic fantasy with little reason to appeal to 'realism'.Mainstream cinema today aspires to making even obvious fantasy, even the anthropomorphised cute animals of animated features, as realistically textured as 'real life', with vast amounts of computer power dedicated to that end. The obviously confected world that glories in its own artifice is a marked, if refreshing, rarity, especially in the commercial cinema – some of Terry Gilliam's films, or Moulin Rouge!, for example.As I checked details of Le voyage à travers l'impossible on IMDb, a CGI dragon flew around the banner advertisement above, not even promoting a film but a smartphone. Terrabytes of memory were no doubt engaged in ensuring that every scale looked authentically reptilian, and each was correctly rendered frame by frame to give a convincing three dimensional effect within the background 'plate'. I doubt audiences are any more convinced by the results than they were by Méliès' painted backdrops and cardboard cutout models. What matters is how good these things look, and how appropriate they are to the storytelling and emotional engagement, not their success at achieving photorealism.As you might guess from the title, this film is in many ways an attempt to repeat the success of Le voyage dans la lune and retreads numerous elements of the earlier film. This time the destination is the sun, and the squabbling explorers are geographers, including a highly strung fat lady who has to be squeezed into confined spaces, not an especially flattering reflection of the small but growing presence of women in academia and the sciences.The geographers' attempt to drive to the sun in a wacky motor coach ends in disaster, so they use a train supported by giant balloons that runs right up the side of (a cardboard cutout of) the Jungfrau and on at the same angle into the sky, an even less likely method of space travel than the ballistic capsule Méliès sent to the moon. The sun turns out to be personified by the gurning face of the director himself, of course; its mouth opens to swallow the train and then it belches solar flares. After some business involving boiling and freezing the party returns in a submarine with a little undersea exploration for good measure before an explosion catapults them ashore.The film persists with the use of long shot tableaux, comprising 26 shots running about 20 minutes, with an additional refinement: the interiors of the train and the sub are revealed by literally removing the fourth wall, using cutaway sets as might be seen on stage. Again there's a lot to take in: in the sub sequence we're expected to keep our eyes on the action in both the engine room and the cabin simultaneously.In terms of the creative control he exercised, Méliès was a true auteur to an extent that has rarely been repeated since. He not only wrote, produced, directed and acted in the films but also took direct responsibility for set and costume design, special effects, lighting and camera. This film finds him at the peak of his powers. Of his own films, Méliès himself was most proud of his historical epic La civilisation à travers les âges (1908) but that film is sadly lost, so Le voyage à travers l'impossible arguably stands as his greatest surviving masterpiece.

Red-Barracuda I suppose you could consider this film as a spiritual follow up to A Trip to the Moon. The latter remains George Méliès most famous and iconic film; probably for good reason considering its ambition and imagination. An Impossible Voyage explores similar territory and is certainly a worthy companion-piece as an example of early cinematic science fiction.In this one a group of scientists don't go to the moon, they head further afield to the sun. Perhaps this illustrates Méliès reaching out further too. Certainly this is another example of him developing the idea of what cinema could be. Unlike most of his peers, he was taking the medium into the story-telling sphere. Films like this were in this sense the beginnings of modern cinema as we know it.The film features a nice colour tint that adds a great deal to the fantastical look. It contains a number of hand painted sets that gives it all a highly stylised look. The scientists' adventure not only takes them to the sun but also across the mountains of Switzerland, which Méliès also depicts like an alien landscape. The travellers end up in the bottom of the ocean completing their amazing journey. All in all this is an entertaining and highly imaginative work, well worth catching.