A man boards an early dirigible-like machine and travels into the Arctic to find his lost son. There he finds an island heated by volcanic fissures, and a long-lost viking colony who have claimed the island as their home--one they defend against all outsiders, which causes our heroes some distress.
I call it bad, but it isn't, really. It's just too close to being good without actually being good. This was one of my favorite movies as a kid, which I guess shows how easily I was entertained then. I just saw it on a 30th anniversary DVD, and parts of it hold up well. Some of the visuals are striking, and Maurice Jarre has a nice soundtrack. Parts of it don't, like the racist portrayal of the cowardly Eskimo ("Inuit" not being part of the vocabulary back then). And some of the costumes look like they're one step up from a high school theater production.
The chief problem is the flatness of the plot, though. They spend over a half hour just getting to the Island, and almost no time interacting with the vikings before they're chased through a series of mountain trails, caverns, volcanoes and lakes. I know it was made for kids with a thirty-second attention span, but even so, I wish they'd spent more time in the viking village before being chased off.
Still, it kept me entertained, even now. Some of the aerial photography is strikingly beautiful, as the airship flies over parts of Greenland and catches some amazing views of polar bears and what look to be some kind of elk. And, while the plot is pretty scatterbrained, the filmmakers at least took care to cut out the boring parts once the protagonists reach the island.
I call it bad, but it isn't, really. It's just too close to being good without actually being good. This was one of my favorite movies as a kid, which I guess shows how easily I was entertained then. I just saw it on a 30th anniversary DVD, and parts of it hold up well. Some of the visuals are striking, and Maurice Jarre has a nice soundtrack. Parts of it don't, like the racist portrayal of the cowardly Eskimo ("Inuit" not being part of the vocabulary back then). And some of the costumes look like they're one step up from a high school theater production.
The chief problem is the flatness of the plot, though. They spend over a half hour just getting to the Island, and almost no time interacting with the vikings before they're chased through a series of mountain trails, caverns, volcanoes and lakes. I know it was made for kids with a thirty-second attention span, but even so, I wish they'd spent more time in the viking village before being chased off.
Still, it kept me entertained, even now. Some of the aerial photography is strikingly beautiful, as the airship flies over parts of Greenland and catches some amazing views of polar bears and what look to be some kind of elk. And, while the plot is pretty scatterbrained, the filmmakers at least took care to cut out the boring parts once the protagonists reach the island.