These adventures, and others, are told with a cheerfulness and a light touch that never betray the time and money it took to create them. It's one thing to spent $46 million; it's another to spend it insouciantly. The movie begins when the baron indignantly interrupts a play that is allegedly based on his life, and continues as he tells the "real" story of his travels - which took him not merely to Turkey but also to the moon, to the heart of a volcano, and into the stomach of a sea monster so big that people actually lived there quite comfortably, once they had been swallowed.
The baron (John Neville) is accompanied on some of these adventures by his friends, including not only the world's fastest man, but also the world's strongest man, the man with the best hearing in the world, and another friend who does not have great eyesight, but owns glasses that allow him to see almost any distance. Even when he is separated from these comrades, the baron travels in good company: when a Venus appears from a seashell, she is played by Uma Thurman, the young innocent from "Dangerous Liaisons," and when the man in the moon appears, he is Robin Williams, with a detachable head that is able to spin off into the night on its own.
Some of the effects in this movie are actually quite wonderful, as when the baron and a friend return from the moon by climbing down two lengths of the same rope again and again, while the markings of a celestial globe apportion the sky behind them. In another scene, a giant feather falls softly onto a vast plain, while the baron tries to understand what strange new world he has found.
Neville, a veteran of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Canada, keeps his composure in the midst of these special effects, and seems sensible and matter-of-fact, as anyone would if they had spent a lifetime growing accustomed to the incredible.
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