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 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (TV) More at IMDbPro »

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15 out of 21 people found the following review useful:
Simply awful, 22 January 2005
1/10
Author: Rupert Schwarz from Germany

It is like pissing on Jules Vernes Grave. Nemo is just a simple maniac and Michael Cain lost every talent. Pierre Arronax is some kind of bad son who never find a way out of his fathers shadow (Verne never mentioned that. I wonder). Ned Land is a psycho. His only goal is to kill a whale. *sigh* Cabe Attucks is ... not a person created by Verne. And Nemos Daughter is... hey, wait a moment. What the f*** is going on. And where the hell is the whole relationship between Arronax and Nemo? They developed a very fine friendship despite the fact, that Arronax disapproved some actions Nemo undertook.

20,000 leagues under the sea is still after more the 100 years a fantastic book with a sense of wonder. But the film is simply bullshit.

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7 out of 8 people found the following review useful:
Worst film I ever watched., 2 January 2008
1/10
Author: tigre_guanajuato from Germany

I read the book years ago and I love it so much that I watched the film version made in 1954 and it was great. Yesterday, I convinced some friends to watch this version from 1997, because the acting was promising and I was expecting nicer special effects than those made in 1954. Well, I have to say that RTL2 chose the worst movie they could have ever chosen for New Years Eve. These guys trying to be original changed the original story to a really boring story, full with inconsistencies and bad acting. Save your time and angriness and don't watch this film, try better to get the version from 1954 which won 2 Oscars and is really based on the novel from Jules Verne.

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8 out of 10 people found the following review useful:
Second best made-for-TV version of 1997., 18 October 2000
Author: SanDiego from The Beach

1997 saw two TV versions of Jules Verne's classic and I suppose which ever a viewer saw first would forever tarnish their view of the second (Warning: I saw the other version first.) This means neither film was all that bad, neither all that great, and neither threw the Disney version off it's pedestal as being the true film classic (James Mason, Kirk Douglas, and Peter Lorre are a tough act to follow). Personally, I will watch ANYTHING remotely associated with Jules Verne so don't get too upset at my review, I did purchase it for my collection. Yet, compared to the other TV version, this version which features Michael Caine as Captain Nemo is overlong and without style. It boasts a great cast (well cast and decent performances), nice sets, and sufficient special effects, but little imagination. While it lights up like a Christmas tree in production values, it pales in making anything seem interesting. I expect remakes to show me something a little different than what I've seen or read and this whole film tries to base itself on things all too familiar. Dig deeper! Please read my review of 1997's other "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" for that film had style and some original additions. In previous versions we were awed by James Mason behind his pipe organ like the Phantom of the Nautilus, and Ben Cross chilled us as he stood atop his submarine like a Russian commander with American gun fire bursting around him. In this version Michael Caine's bags under his eyes suggested he was quite tired and made me feel very sleepy as well. 1969's "Captain Nemo and the Underwater City" with a nothing budget and a bland cast (Robert Ryan, Chuck Conners!!!) was more interesting! But it is Jules Verne and can be proud to be the second best made-for-TV version of "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" to be aired in 1997. I may have been a little harsh, but I think Captain Nemo would have it no other way.

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6 out of 7 people found the following review useful:
overlong and boring, 16 May 2002
4/10
Author: william_blake from Finland

jules verne makes imaginative books, but let's face it, the attempts to move them to the big screen are destined to fail. especially if you're lacking money. jules had such wild ideas that they cannot be produced anywhere but inside the readers mind.

this particular one has a great cast, but the mini way too long compared to the boredom it arouses. i had to use three days to watch it because i kept falling asleep.

the special effects look amateurish, and all the intensity from the book has vanished somewhere in the production. all i felt about it was a little claustrophobia.

a tip to the crew: you should have asked the champ, kevin costner, he could have probably told that it's not automatically an epic if you make it long. you need some events, too, you know.

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7 out of 9 people found the following review useful:
Good grief., 30 November 2002
3/10
Author: kobus666 from Copenhagen, Denmark

WHY?

Disney already made the definitive cinematic adaptation of Jules Verne's novel in 1954 (needs DVD reissue badly;) there was no reason at all for Hollywood to crank out this awful piece of television fluff. There are so many things wrong with it, one does not know where to begin. A review is hardly even necessary, a rock-bottom vote should speak plenty:

During the shameless 'creative reimagineering' process they stripped away pretty much everything from the novel save for the basic premise of a rogue skipper named Nemo who has a submarine. Oh, and Nemo is now a cyborg with a metal hand and is "portrayed" by the formerly respectable Michael Caine. A standard multi-ethnic sample of modern teenagers or twentysomethings get on board and there's much Angst and Father/Son conflict and everything goes kablooie in the end with a bunch of cheap video effects. The production design is flat and dull and totally undercooked, but things of course happens very fast. The skewed camera angles, MTV paced cuts and the aforementioned cast of bratty young people all add up to a pre-chewed microwave fluff pastry of a TV movie for the types of young people who were very happy to learn there really was a J. Dawson on board the real Titanic. ("OMG!")

rating : 1 of 10



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7 out of 9 people found the following review useful:
WHY?!!!, 3 August 2002
Author: maxvaughn from Arizona, USA/Hull, England

I was in the seventh grade when I saw this movie and going through a Jules Verne/Robert Louis Stevenson phase. I loved the original movie and when I found out the cast for the remake my face must have just lit up because my parents gave me a blank tape for when it came on. I didn't have a chance to watch it the night it was on, so I saved the movie for a rainy day. What a waste of a rainy day. It started off well, the acting was great and they were trying to hold onto the original message. Then, it kept going and going and soon I wasn't sure what the point was anymore. The ending was the worst part and I found myself taping over it a year later. Oh well, another remake that fell short of the theme.

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4 out of 4 people found the following review useful:
Unwatchable miserable awful horrible TV, 14 December 2006
1/10
Author: John Holden from United States

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

On the level of the worst Disney and more like some 1930s action-adventure movie where, say, the guide yells "Look" and points left while the camera cuts to cheap stock footage of a lion running off to the right somewhere.

There is nothing - not one single thing - worth watching in this movie. Even Caine is bad.

The effects - one of the reasons one might watch something like this - are below anything you can imagine: a ship floats in the back on an ocean a different color from the "real" ocean in front; the octopus has one rubber tentacle that's dragged around in an aquarium.

But most - maybe 95% - of the movie is talk. Nemo shows folks around his sub for hours (or days or weeks); the hero lectures some scientists forever. it's just talk and more talk with an occasional shot of a metal sub model.

Avoid this at any cost. It's not even watchable over pizza when you're reading or doing something else; it's not even close to as good as the worst Godzilla movie; it's worse than "Plan 9" but without the camp.

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5 out of 6 people found the following review useful:
RUN, don't walk away from this film!, 19 January 2008
1/10
Author: PaulandNeva from United States

We gave this thing forty minutes to spark our interest. The acting is wooden,and the computerized special effects are laughable, obvious, and have that "slapped on" feeling and look. We couldn't even stand to finish it skipping whole chapters. This can't possibly be all that faithful a telling of this story.

McDreamy is McCrappy, Bryan Brown is bad, and Michael Caine HAS to be embarrassed. The ship isn't even all that imaginative, the whales look fake, and by the time the first ship is attacked, we were rooting for a sinking.

Avoid this movie like the flotsam it is.

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5 out of 6 people found the following review useful:
I'll Destract It, While You Kick It In The Tentecles!, 1 March 2005
1/10
Author: MetalMiike from England

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

Michael Caine as Captain Nemo. Michael Caine as an embittered Indian Prince. Since when were Indian Princes blond, blue-eyed, wide-boy cockneys? In the book, Arronax is somewhat like Watson to Nemo's Holmes. In this version he is a flouncing runt who not only sleeps with his Father's young wife but Nemo' daughter too. Where Nemo actually got a daughter from I'll never know. This production is utter excrement. Unwatchable. The production design is unattractive, the casting is wrong, the... I'm bored now. Usually when I encounter a bad film (The BBC Christmas Sherlock Holmes adaptations for example) I like to have a good rant and give everyone involved the ticking off the deserve but with this, I can't.I just can't. It's not that interesting. There isn't even a story, just endless padding. Brian Nelson is obviously an amateur hack who hammered out the screenplay the night before it was due in. We have to blame somebody, though there is nothing in this whole production that is right. OK; lets blame everybody.

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9 out of 14 people found the following review useful:
James Mason's mantle is safe around his shoulders, 20 September 2000
Author: (tom_amity@hotmail.com) from Lincoln, Nebraska

I have nothing against fun and fantasy. But this piece has so little to do with Verne's story that I wonder why the writers didn't just dispense with their token analogies to it and create new characters!

Yes, Caine's performance is "intense", but also utterly meaningless: his Nemo has none of the subtlety, the pensiveness, the drivenness of James Mason's; the two can no more be compared than Kevin Costner's Robin Hood can be compared to Errol Flynn's, or Marlon Brando's performance as Bligh in Mutiny on the Bounty to Charles Laughton's. The ballyhooed "intensity" of Caine's portrayal resolves itself into very little more than hypermanic nuttiness. (Maybe Caine was trying so hard to avoid being compared to Mason that he couldn't figure any other way to do the role than to toss all subtlety overboard?)

The character of Attucks, of course, is the "man of action" that the plot needs, thus totally eclipsing Ned Land and making the latter's presence gratuitous. So if the writers were so obsessed with political correctness that they needed to add a nonwhite character, why in the world not just make Ned himself nonwhite?

And haven't we had enough of upstarts trying to improve on Verne by adding a love interest? Apparently not: this version gives Nemo a daughter, who sails with him on the Nautilus and with whom Aronnax (here depicted as a young sexpot) has an affair.

Of course, the fact that this Nautilus has a multi-ethnic crew (an idea hinted at, but not developed by, Verne himself) is a nice touch, but one that doesn't take us very far because this version tells us so little about Nemo's and the crew's background. In conclusion, a lot of fine acting talent is wasted on this philosophically confused piece of work.

Verne has suffered a bewildering number of bad adaptations, but this is ridiculous.

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