Yawn. Poorly Filmed Snooze Fest.

It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

This is a very important subject. What we are looking at here is one of the first epics. It's long for a Georges Melies film (24 minutes even), but it's a good watch. An Impossible Voyage is about a group of geographers who travel across the world in an assortment of vehicles to plot the world. The vehicles that they come up with are out there and unique, which only adds to the charm. It really has to be seen, to be believed. I always marvel at the amounts of effort gone into these films and An Impossible Voyage is just an amplification of that. This one, as I said, is long for a Melies film but it's really worth a watch. As a film, this is better than the 1 or 2 minute shorts that you will usually see. A Trip to the Moon, maybe the only Melies film as good as this one. I say, definitely give it a watch. It's fun and mesmerizing.

In 1895, a stage magician named Georges Méliès witnessed how the Lumière brothers changed the history of entertainment when he attended the first public screening of their projected motion pictures, and was marveled at the idea of moving images. Seven years and dozens of short films later, Méliès was a successful filmmaker on his own account, releasing a movie that would become legendary, "Le Voyage Dans La Lune" ("A Trip to the Moon"), a monumental achievement in which he would finally prove that cinema was more than documentaries and "gimmick films", and that there was something that the Lumières couldn't see: that it was a natural medium for telling stories. So, after having great success with "Le Voyage Dans La Lune", Méliès prepared his next major project as another adaptation of a Jules Verne story: "Le Voyage à Travers l'impossible", or "The Voyage Through the Impossible".Better known as "The Impossible Voyage", "Le Voyage à Travers l'impossible" is the story of a geographic society (presumably French), which decides to make the ultimate trip. As one can imagine, this won't be a normal voyage, as they will use every vehicle they can use in an attempt to travel across every corner of the world. So, with this in mind, they prepare a train at the Swiss Alps with their advanced machinery and begin their journey. However, first they must arrive to the train, so they use "The Impossible Carriage" to get across the mountains, and after several difficulties, manage to get to the train. With their specially equipped train, the group manages to fly high in the sky, and are literally swallowed by the Sun. The group will face more difficulties, as their voyage will take them to many fantastic places, from the Sun to even the bottom of the Ocean.The film's source, "Le Voyage à Travers l'impossible", was a play written collaboratively by Jules Verne and French dramatist Adolphe d'Ennery in 1882, in which the writers adapted to stage the style and themes that Verne had been used in his popular novels. Naturally, Méliès' adaptation lacks the benefits of having dialogs, but his version of "The Impossible Voyage" does keep the same atmosphere of Jules Verne's literary work, capturing the spirit of science fiction in each act of the film and mixing it with that magical fantasy and charmingly whimsical humor that Méliès used to employ in each one of his films. With a runtime of only 24 minutes (something unheard of at the time of its release), "The Impossible Voyage" shows a progression of what Méliès did in "A Trip to the Moon", as the narrative is built in a tighter way (despite the similarities with that previous masterpiece).As usual in a film by Georges Méliès, the real magic of the movie lays in the extremely clever and detailed way in which Méliès creates his special effects, and in the beautiful art direction he uses to make his fantasy come alive. The world of "The Impossible Voyage" seems like a more detailed trip to the same universe of "A Trip to the Moon", where insanely courageous scientists and inventors use their wonderful and crazy machines to conquer the limits of their fantastic world. In this there's a difference with Verne, as while in the writer's novels there's always a certain factuality in his devices, Méliès versions have more of magical than scientific, which goes perfectly with the comedic tone he uses in his adventure films. A magician until the end, Méliès creates wonderful special effects using every single photographic trick he had discovery at the time (there's a wonderful use of miniatures in the movie).While the legendary classic "Le Voyage Dans La Lune" is certainly an iconic masterpiece (it'll always be Méliès' most famous work), personally I found "Le Voyage à Travers l'impossible" to be a superior film. Maybe it was that I saw it hand-tinted (which gives it an even more beautiful look) or the fact that it gave me the feeling that in this movie Méliès just let his creativity run completely free, but I just enjoyed this one (a bit) more. True, it's a bit tacky for our standards, but even today it holds up surprisingly well and remains as fun as when it was originally done, more than a century ago. "Le Voyage à Travers l'impossible", or "The Impossible Voyage", definitely makes a perfect companion piece to "Le Voyage Dans La Lune", and it's a nice introduction to the magic of Georges Méliès, the Cinemagician.10/10

Released in 1904, cinematic magician Georges Méliès' 'Le Voyage à travers l'impossible / The Impossible Voyage' often stands in the shadow of the filmmaker's earlier success 'Le Voyage dans la lune / A Trip to the Moon (1902),' which has long-since earned itself the label of a cinematic classic. In many ways, however, 'Le Voyage à travers l'impossible' is a superior film, brimming with stunning set and model-work, creative visual effects, an exciting around-the-world journey and no shortage of imagination!At 24 minutes in length (which was almost unheard of at the time), 'Le Voyage à travers l'impossible' was no doubt heavily inspired by its more famous predecessor, as well as Jules Verne and Adolphe d'Ennery's play of the same name. The version of the film most commonly viewed nowadays (featured on the "Landmarks of Early Film – Volume 2" DVD) features a hand-coloured print, supplemented with narration penned by Méliès himself.Like most of Méliès' films, the narrative is played out like a stage play, with the story usually divided into various distinct one-take scenes, the camera settled at a distance from the action. The first few minutes of the film are concerned with organising this "impossible voyage," which will entail the use of every known means of locomotion – including trains, automobiles, dirigible balloons, submarines and boats. An engineer (played, I believe, by the director himself) explains his extraordinary plans to the members of a geographic society, who meet his proposal with wholehearted enthusiasm. The voyage itself is an unparalleled triumph of early visual effects. The members of the expedition are first whisked away in a fast-moving train, which is particularly significant in that, at the time, the train was seen as an invention that could take you anywhere. 'Le Voyage à travers l'impossible' takes this idea to the literal extreme, symbolic of the ever-expanding possibilities of the era.That iconic image of the scientists' rocket piercing the eye of the Man on the Moon has permanently become engrained in the minds of film-goers. In this film, we meet the Sun, who unexpectedly comes face-to-face with a flying locomotive. The gradual emergence of the Sun from behind the shifting clouds is a genuinely beautiful sight, and the face which comprises it is infinitely more pleasant than the nasty, ugly brute from a later Méliès film, 'L' Éclipse du soleil en pleine lune / The Eclipse: Courtship of the Sun and Moon (1907).' Letting out a wide yawn to welcome in the new day, the Sun is understandably startled when the expedition's soaring train enters its outstretched mouth, and he proceeds to cough trails of flame.On the surface of the Sun, the engineer and his band of fellow travellers set out to explore this strange new landscape, before the rising of the Sun precipitates a drastic rise in temperature (sounds unusual, but you'll have to suspend belief with this dubious logic). As all the explorers clamber into a specially-made icebox to cool down, all but the engineer are frozen into a block of solid ice. Rescued from a frosty fate by the leader of the expedition (who shrewdly decides to light a fire), the team tumbles into their only remaining means of travel – a submarine – and launch themselves off the face of the Sun and into the depths of the ocean.Some viewers may find it difficult to accept this film's questionable take on science and logic, but this all adds to the charm of it. Méliès – a master of magician's tricks, puffs of smoke and impossible disappearances – was never concerned with reality, but with transporting his audiences into a world quite unlike their own. In an era where so many directors were neither daring nor imaginative enough to make the impossible happen on screen, 'Le Voyage à travers l'impossible' is the pinnacle of early film-making.

After the success of A Trip to the Moon that had the iconic moment of the rocket lodged in the moon's eye, Georges Melies made The Impossible Voyage and had a train go into the sun's mouth. Then we see the passengers get all hot so someone gets all the ice but then all of them, except one who stayed outside the train, now gets frozen! How they get unfrozen shouldn't be too hard to guess but I won't reveal here. There's also some good slapstick pieces involving fire and steam and luggage in the beginning. Wonderful use of color-tinting throughout. Like A Trip to the Moon, The Impossible Voyage is based on a Jules Verne tale and is just as fascinating as the previous film. By all means, if you're a Melies enthusiast, seek this one out.