20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1997 Village Roadshow film)

For the 1997 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea film by The Hallmark Channel, see 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1997 Hallmark film).

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
DVD Cover
Directed by	Rod Hardy
Produced by	Dean Barnes
Written by	Brian Nelson (teleplay) Jules Verne (novel)
Starring	Michael Caine Patrick Dempsey
Music by	Mark Snow
Cinematography	James Bartle Ron Hagen Bruce Phillips
Editing by	Drake Silliman
Distributed by	Village Roadshow Pictures
Release date(s)	1997
Running time	158 min.
Country	Template:FilmUS Australia
Language	English

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is a 1997 television movie produced by Village Roadshow Pictures, based on the novel by Jules Verne.

Cast

• Michael Caine as Captain Nemo
• Patrick Dempsey as Pierre Arronax
• Mia Sara as Mara
• Bryan Brown as Ned Land
• Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje as Cabe Attucks
• John Bach as Thierry Arronax
• Nicholas Hammond as Saxon
• Peter McCauley as Admiral McCutcheon

Events

In this version:

The Nautilus has been sinking and damaging ships and is at first thought to be a giant narwhal.

The Nautilus gets its power by extracting the sun's heat from the sea water: this is impossible technology, and the movie wrongly calls it hydroelectricity.

Pierre Aronnax and Ned Land and Cabe Attucks fall off the USS Abraham Lincoln and are picked up by the Nautilus.

Pierre Aronnax's father Thierry Aronnax is with the US naval party.

Nemo is setting an underwater domed city under the Atlantic south of West Africa. To avoid earthquake risks to it, he is first setting up a network of underwater explosives to release all Earth's geotectonic tensions at once and thus ensure that no more build up for a long while. During this a Chinese-looking pearl diving girl accidentally activates one of these devices and the Nautilus rescues her in time.

Nemo has a daughter called Mara.

The US Navy finds where Nemo's base is by a concentrated area of sightings of the Nautilus. The USS Abraham Lincoln sails to the place.

At site, damage caused by Ned Land, and torpedoes fired downwards by the Abraham Lincoln, force the Nautilus to surface. The Nautilus's crew come out on deck and are summarily machine-gunned by the Abraham Lincoln's deck-mounted Gatling guns. Mara and some others escape in one of the Nautilus's diving bells. Pierre Aronnax and Ned Land and Cabe Attucks get onboard the Abraham Lincoln. A US naval man boards the Nautilus and shoots Nemo and another survivor on sight. Nemo, before dying, activates a switch which makes the Nautilus explode.

Pierre Aronnax's account of these events finds its way to Jules Verne, who uses it as a basis for his novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

External links

• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea at the Internet Movie Database