1916 Directed by Stuart Paton
Captain Nemo has built a fantastic submarine for his mission of revenge. He has traveled over 20,000 leagues in search of Charles Denver - a man who caused the death of Princess Daaker. Seeing what he had done, Denver took the daughter to his yacht and sailed away.
20.000 Meilen unter dem Meer, 20.000 leguas de viaje submarino, 20000 Meilen unter dem Meer, 20 000 lieues sous les mers, 20,000 milja ispod mora, Ventimila leghe sotto i mari, 20.000 Léguas Submarinas, 20000 лье под водой, 海底两万里
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France
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Stuart Paton levou muito a sério essa ideia de adaptar um livro para o cinema, não por ser extremamente fiel a obra original, mas por dar extremamente mais força aos textos do que a encenação, tem o mesmo problema de "L'Inferno", a única diferença é que, se no longa italiano os textos tinham uma real importância ao mesmo tempo em que a mise-en-scène era brilhante, aqui rola muito texto desneceesário, e quando Paton tenta deixar as imagens se comunicarem por si só, é desastroso, parece que não acerta em nada do que propõe.
Se alguém me dissesse que, Christopher Nolan voltou no tempo e fez um filme nos anos 10, pode ter certeza que seria esse aqui, ficção cientifica, com uma encenação porca e exposição exagerada (o primeiro filme verborrágico da história?), resultando em uma obra pouco interessante e aparentemente sem proposta alguma.
A rumored sea monster has been wreaking havoc in oceans around the world, prompting an expedition by a United States naval ship. When the boat is sunk by the “monster”, actually a remarkably designed submarine called the Nautilus, Professor Aronnax, his daughter, and a famous harpooner, Ned Land, are taken prisoner by Captain Nemo, an enigmatic figure played by Allen Holubar. As Nemo takes his unwitting guests on an unforgettable voyage, showing them the wonders of the ocean floor, Union Army soldiers are marooned when their balloon lands on a mysterious island, where they encounter a woman who has been surviving in the wild for many years. When these two scenarios ultimately cross paths, the captain's tragic past is finally…
I'm going to start this review by paraphrasing Ian Malcolm
Your filmmakers were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to question whether they should
Where 'cinema of attractions' went to die -- this movie capitalizes fully on then-new developments in underwater photography to show 1916 audiences something that 99% of them had never seen.It also makes up a whole bunch of irrelevant plot points, including filling in all of Cpt. Nemo's backstory. I guess Verne's outline didn't leave room for any romance or suchlike boy/girl doings, so they throw in a bunch of stuff that vaguely reminded me of Melmoth The Wanderer.
Despite its prominence, the 1954 Disney adaptation of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea was never on my radar. The most prominent version in my life has been this silent one, due to being covered in the 1997 science fiction film documentary Hollywood Aliens and Monsters, which I taped and watched over and over, although I didn’t actually see it until the YouTube era in 2013 or so.
This actually adapts Verne’s other Nemo tale, Mysterious Island, as well, and as such Nemo is an Indian, played by Indian act-ha no I’m yanking your chain it’s a white guy in brown face. Rather than integrate the two we have two parallel stories, with a jungle woman added to the…
It’s fascinating as a technical and historical document. Unfortunately it becomes so enamoured with its own technical achievements that it forgets to be entertaining.
1916
A genuinely striking technical accomplishment that's been exquisitely restored by Kino for its recent blu ray release. Maybe this is just all the "being stuck inside" talking, but we shouldn't take this films visual document of marine life from this era for granted. Especially given the way our environment is so rapidly changing around us (to say nothing of the recent Japanese oil spill).
Material from The Mysterious Island is also incorporated here, which weirdly works even though it doubles the amount of brown/black-face mugging on display. There's a sliding scale for these kinds of things, but for me this remains a mostly innocuous example of the practice.
I should also stress that this is a technical achievement first…
While for it’s time this movie’s underwater sequences would have been advanced, the plot and story of the film is slow and dull. Little is explained properly and Captain Nemo’s swaying choices between revenge and saving everyone he sees confuses the already lacking plot. A rather boring venture in all
The film opens with nearly 10 minutes of text, not a good way to keep me interested. Too reliant on text to tell the story which makes the film seem slower and longer than it is. Without the text I wouldn't know what was going on even though the filmed scene were pretty well handled and "acted". Not sure why but Captain Nemo kept making me think of Santa Claus for some reason. Some good under water sequences could've save this movie from being below average.
It's your basic (very) early silent movie: Badly paced, pretty sexist and racist and with just the barest semblance of a plot - in this case, one that has been cobbled together from two entirely separate Verne novels. Occasionally amusing, though.
