Not the 1961 version with visual effects by Ray Harryhausen and the great Herbert Lom as Captain Nemo.
Neither you or I are that lucky.
Not the 2005 version with Kyle MacLachlan, and Patrick Stewart as Nemo. Even that would be better.
Not even the 2012 Journey 2: The Mysterious Island (which doesn’t even have Nemo).
No, I suffered through the 2010 TV movie, with Gina Holden, Lochlyn Munro, and Pruitt Taylor-Vince. It even has father-son team Mark Sheppard, and William Morgan Sheppard (as the young and old versions of Nemo, respectively).
Rotten Tomatoes couldn’t muster the energy to rate it, but the IMDB lists it at 3.6 out of 10.
Verdict
Exceptional only in being tedious.
Synopsis
In 1874, Jules Verne published L’île mystérieuse. It was a crossover sequel to both Twenty-Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and In Search of the Castaways. Five northern prisoners of war escape by balloon from the siege of Richmond during the Civil War and miraculously find themselves in the South Pacific.
They have many adventures and mysterious rescues by persons or forces unknown. Eventually, they discover that their savior is none other than Captain Nemo. He retired to this island with his submarine, the Nautilus after the rest of the crew died.
Then the island erupts. The main characters survive on the last rock remaining above water, until conveniently rescued by a ship alerted to their plight by a message that Nemo left before the eruption ever happened.
Now, that’s just the book.
The TV movie begins to deviate from the book almost immediately. Pencroff (J.D. Evermore) is no longer a sailor, but a Confederate sergeant. Harding (Lochlyn Munro) no longer has a dog named Top. The “boy” is no longer Pencroff’s ward, but a Union soldier named Herbert (Caleb Michaelson). The journalist, Gideon Spilett (Pruitt Taylor Vince) dies during the escape and never makes it to the island. Tom Ayrton (Lawrence Turner) does exist in the book, as the stranded former captain of a band of pirates. Here he’s a coward who’s willing to fight, and a deserter.
Then things get way off course.
They travel through some black hole in the middle of a purple storm cloud, and wake up on what they assume is an island. Within a few days, they discover an antebellum mansion, humanoid monsters that roam the island at night, and witness an airplane crash. The two survivors of the crash, Julia “Jules” Fogg (Gina Holden, playing a character named for Jules Verne and his character Phineas Fogg) and Abby Fogg (Susie Abromeit) are from 2012, thus cementing the dimensional/time travel element into the movie.
They have adventures, meet Captain Nemo, and finally use 1.21 gigawatts of lightning to escape…or do they?
Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island (2010) commits the cardinal sin of theater: it’s boring. The characters are one-dimensional at best. There’s no attempt to make any of them likeable or to get us to care about them. The plot somehow manages to be more ludicrous and unbelievable than a 19th-century SciFi novel. The special effects aren’t very special.
If you must watch, here is a drinking game you can play:
- Every time Abby complains, drink.
- Every time Pencroff disagrees with Harding, drink.
- Every time Pencroff says something disparaging about another character, drink.
- Every time Harding exhibits a new field of scientific knowledge, drink.
- Every time an anachronism goes without comment, drink.
- Every time Julia blames herself, drink.
- Every time Julia apologizes for something, drink.
Okay, Mark Sheppard (Warehouse 13, Supernatural, Leverage, and two episodes of Doctor Who) directed this. I love the guy as an actor, and I hate to bag on something his second ever directorial effort.
I can say that the editing and art design is good (costume design isn’t – modern thermal underwear does not look like woolen union suits).
That’s it, though.
Lessons
Here are some things that would improve this movie.
First, dump the music. It’s not awful, but it’s used poorly (sorry again, Mr. Sheppard) in that it’s there constantly. There’s no changes in tone or tempo. It’s as if the Jaws theme played constantly through Jaws. Eventually you’d get sick of it. The way Steven Spielberg used the theme, though, heightened tension. This doesn’t.
Second, the characters need more focus. Back in 1874, it was okay for a railroad engineer to be an expert in everything. In 2010, that’s right out. You either need to explain Harding’s academic background, or have him be an engineer.
In fact, Harding pissed me off when I realized how long he’d been on the island without even trying to make a compass, an astrolabe, or a sundial. If he knows so damn much, the writer needed to hang a lantern on why Harding doesn’t try to figure out where they are.
In an odd way, Abby Fogg was my favorite character. She was a bitchy, spoiled, brat, and that’s annoying, but she was consistent. Scene to scene, you could count on Abby to be herself. The other characters tended to be whatever the scene needed them to be.
The characters need sympathetic qualities, and opportunities to show them. Why did Harding free Neb? What did Harding sacrifice to get his education? Why are any of them in the Army? Why does Pencroff believe so strongly in the Confederacy? Give us something we can understand and relate to.
Now, that takes screen time, so you’re going to have to do two things: One, combine character revealing moments with other events and activities onscreen. Two, cut some characters. You already killed off one of Mr. Verne’s original characters. Don’t add in two others.
Third, focus the movie. One way to do that is to pick a theme. There’s almost a theme already – that of individual versus collective good, with Pencroff on the side of individualism and Harding on the side of collectivism.
The best thing you could do, as a writer (I’m talking to you, Cameron Larson), is to show both sides as being right. That makes for terrific drama.
Focusing means that you’re going to have to cut some things out of the movie. I would suggest focusing more on the struggle to survive on the island. Go back and watch the 1961 version, and look how long it takes them to meet Captain Nemo, and what they go through before they meet him. Make the island a scary place rather than one where your viewers might enjoy a vacation.
Fourth, and as long as I’m on the subject of writing, you need to work on your story structure. Your story can’t be all highs, with no lows or middles. Everything grays out, and we lose interest as viewers.
Here’s what you want:
- Set-up: A group of prisoners escape and wind up marooned in an isolated place with some natural threat that acts as a countdown timer.
- First Turning-Point: There are monsters here, and that ends Act One. Monsters are a general (but not generic) threat because they would attack anything they perceived as food.
- At the start of Act Two, the castaways learn to coexist with the monsters. Finding some way to channel the natural threat to deal with the monsters reminds us that the natural threat still exists.
- Second Turning-Point: There are pirates here (or the survivors of Nemo’s crew), and that ends Act Two. This is the best place for the revelation that the natural threat is escalating. For some reason that should have been set-up in Act One, only the castaways recognize the natural threat’s escalation. The pirates (or whatever) are a specific threat because they target the castaways.
- At the start of Act Three, the castaways start trying to escape the island and get away from the human threat.
- Climax: The castaways must face their greatest fears, and the human threat, in order to get their fondest desire – escape, just as the natural threat destroys the island.
That’s no excuse for a modern writer.
Remember the First Law of Coincidence: You’re allowed one big coincidence in the entire story. If that coincidence is that the Nautilus still works and the castaways can escape in it, great. If that coincidence is that one of the castaways possesses one piece of critical knowledge to get the Nautilus, or Nemo’s time machine working again, terrific. But that’s all you get. Everything else must flow logically and clearly from character and setting.
You also need to be consistent. If Neb is too self-conscious to carry a white woman, you need to bow to all the 19th-century social norms. Meaning mostly that men did not walk around without suits and coats on in mixed company.
If you can’t go all the way, don’t even take the first step.
Fifth, mind your budget, every step of the way. When you’re a writer, you don’t have as much control, but starting in pre-production the director and producer should be focusing on what effects, casting, and locations cost.
For example, don’t shoot near a Civil War battlefield if you can’t show us tents and armies. In fact, if the war plays no role in the story, there’s no point in using it.
As another example, the first time I saw one of your monsters clearly, it was obviously a human being in a ghillie suit. I’m sure that was cheaper than giant crabs and monstrous birds. It’s even okay that they turn out to be members of Nemo’s crew corrupted by exposure to “electromagnetic forces of the isolation.” What’s not okay is leaving that revelation until the end. Link it to the volcano, and have the effect getting worse as the volcano nears eruption.
That’s going to mean, however, revealing the nature of the monsters sooner and making it matter (in other words, the complete opposite of what’s actually in the movie). Have the corruption affect our heroes, starting before they meet Nemo. Then Nemo can explain it when he reveals himself, and can explain how he’s gone 20 years without being corrupted himself.
By the way, Nemo revealing himself needed more build-up and better revelation. In the book, Nemo does quite a bit to help the castaways before revealing himself. Here, he does almost nothing. You need to make sure that Nemo has a reason for revealing himself at a particular time. For example, he might appear at the Second Turning-Point, because he’s responsible for the specific threat.
As a final example, let me bring up the purple storm again. It looked crappy, but I understand why you needed it. In 1874, readers might buy that five men in a hot-air balloon might somehow stay aloft and alive for the time it took them to go from the East Coast of North America to the South Pacific. In 2010, we’re more sophisticated. That said, you need to cut budget elsewhere to make the effect work.
Any two or three of those five points would make a much better movie.
Now, let me talk about a few specific things that jumped out at me, including some where my initial reaction was wrong:
- The use of electro-magnetism: This sounds wrong coming from 19th-century characters, but was actually known to scientists at the time. Lower class, uneducated, people wouldn’t have understood it, but Nemo and Harding certainly should.
- Nemo’s kingdom: Verne reveals in the novel that Nemo was the son of the Hindu Raja of the Kingdom of Bundelkund, and a descendant of Sultan Fateh Ali Tipu of the Kingdom of Mysore. If your audience only knows Nemo from The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen movie, they won’t know what you’re talking about.
- Harding's Social Circle: Captain Harding knowing both U.S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman is supposed to tell the audience that Harding is a big deal. It doesn’t. It makes us wonder why a lowly Captain is so well-known to Union generals, and you don’t tell us.
- The Civil War: Grant captured Richmond in April, 1865. The war was clearly in the Union’s favor at that point. The characters should not have been so shocked by Julia revealing that the Union won. They would have been shocked by how soon it ended after the siege, by Sherman’s march, and by Lincoln’s assassination. I understand that the view from the trenches is different than the view from the historian’s armchair. I led a tank platoon in the First Gulf War. That said, this still rang false in the film (especially when Neb wants to name it “Lincoln Island” in honor of the man who freed the slaves, and Julia mentions nothing of the Great Emancipator’s death – or current racial tensions in the US).
- Balloons: As long as we’re talking about balloons, we should mention that both hot air and hydrogen balloons were used for reconnaissance during the early years of the war, but the balloon corps had been disbanded by 1863. We can forgive Verne for this inconsistency, but combined with the previous point, modern writers should move the story to earlier in the war when the outcome was more in doubt and balloons were in use.
- Military Mindset: I never understood why a group of soldiers, under threat, made no attempt to arm themselves even with simple spears or clubs. They had firearms when they escaped, but they make no attempt to recover them from the crash site. When they do get a weapon (a flare gun), they kept leaving it behind. Soldiers under threat prepare to meet the threat, and then attack.
- The Antebellum Mansion: Okay, I know this is just a personal peeve, but if you find an abandoned house, and you know that there are monsters, you shouldn’t stay in the house. Clearly, whoever built the place couldn’t defend it. I’m sure that a Louisiana historical society forbade the film crew from adding iron bars and stone walls, but that’s just a reason not to use the place, not to use it and ignore the implications. Not to mention that Nemo is from India, and unlikely to build in this style.
- The Earhart Anachronism: Amelia Earhart did not vanish in the Caribbean. There is no reason to bring her into a Bermuda Triangle story. If you do, there’s no reason to be surprised that Civil War soldiers have never heard of her.
- The Evolution Anachronism: Herbert Spencer first wrote about “survival of the fittest” in 1864 in Principles of Biology. Darwin didn’t use the phrase until 1869. Captain Harding tosses it out and everyone acts like they know exactly what he means. First off, this is another example of Captain Harding conveniently knowing whatever the script needs him to know without justification. Second, this is another example of the problems that you create when mixing 19th- and 20th-century characters. Harding’s fellow soldiers should not have understood him.
- The American Dream: Seriously – using phrases like rock star, movie star, and the American Dream are problematic. If your script isn’t going to delve into the cultural differences between the two groups, just don’t do it.
- Volcanic Lightning: I don’t know when the phenomenon of volcanic lightning was first documented, but since we still aren’t sure how it works or why, I find it really implausible that a Union engineer would know about it, be able to predict its appearance, and then harness it.
Overall
This film is a huge mess that’s not even campy enough to be fun. The 1961 version still holds up as an adventure story. Give it a whirl instead.
