Le voyage à travers l'impossible

really a great hand colored early science fiction movie with full of early special effects,greatest moment in the film that they reach the sun and go into the suns mouth with a train,this scene is very familiar with the trip to the moon when they reach the moon. The tour through the swiss landscape is also a great moment.

What an interesting and unusual little feature this is - the combination of Méliès and Jules Verne always produces something worth seeing, and this one is based on one of Verne's most fantastical ideas. It follows a group of scientists and scholars on a very fanciful trip that uses every imaginable form of conveyance, and the story gives Méliès all kinds of opportunities for his trademark visual effects.

Each scene is packed with details, so much so that you cannot even catch it all in one viewing. It is also color-tinted in many places, which adds even more to the effect. The story is just wild, and is less plausible than many Verne stories, but that does not detract from it as entertainment. Méliès even tosses in a little slapstick, which is not too bad for its time. It is similar to, and just a cut below, his film of Verne's "Trip to the Moon", and anyone who enjoyed that classic should also like this one.

Director Georges Méliès was an absolutely brilliant early filmmaker and innovator. His camera tricks, use of a complex plot and sets, and fun-loving fantasy elements in his films made him the greatest film maker of his day. While I recently read that THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY (from Edison Inc.) was the "first full-length film", this simply isn't true, as Méliès' LE VOYAGE DANS LE LUNE (1902) preceded it and was a much more complex film--featuring amazing sets and lots of laughs as a group of scientists take a trip to the moon and meet the evil moon men! Only a year later, in an attempt to outdo his previous success, Méliès made this film about another group of wacky scientists who take a trip to the Sun as well as under the sea!! And, while the original film was a very long 14 minutes (that WAS full-length in its day), this one is 20--making it probably the longest film of its day.

While the new film is obviously strongly derived from the previous Méliès epic, compared to all other films of the day it is still brilliant and not even close to being matched. BUT, my score of 9 is more a way to indicate that it isn't quite as good as his film about the Moon. But, it is still very, very watchable and cute even today (something that can't be said of most other films of the age).

If you want to see this film online, go to Google and type in "Méliès" and then click the video button for a long list of his films that are viewable without special software.

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.

Anybody who's seen Melies' "A Trip to the Moon" should certainly watch this. It not only surpasses the run time of the earlier film, (resulting in a 20 minute production which was amazing for its time), it is visually astounding and fantastic. Even though Melies had already indulged in multi-scene spectacles by this time, this was without a doubt the "Intolerance" of its day. Visual effects, nice color, beautiful sets...wow.

Many people have been calling this a sequel to "A Trip to the Moon" and I can see why they're saying that, because it is yet again a sci-fi topic. Instead of the moon, however, the scientists here go to the sun. There's tons of build-up too. First, they have to build the means of transportation (a train). Then, they go on this huge journey through the Swiss landscape. Then, their car gets busted and they have to spend days in the hospital. Obviously, Melies was more or less padding it out with all this build-up, but with all the action and detail put into each scene, there is plenty to see.

Melies obviously had an imagination. Not only had anybody ever gone to the moon by 1902, ANY sort of space travel was unheard of. Thus, even now we realize how utterly impossible it is to go to the sun (through the mouth, no less). But Melies was all about creating the impossible. This movie is such a visual treat that even people today could be entertained.

Also, it can be noted a supplemental section to this was made, where Crazyloff manages to recover the equipment lost in the sun by using a gigantic magnet to pull it all back to earth. It is unknown whether this section has survived, as John Frazer claims to have once inspected a print, while Malthete lists the short as lost.