20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1997 miniseries)

Did You Know?

• DVD Verdict wrote the miniseries 'comes off as incomplete', but praised Michael Caine's performance as Captain Nemo.
• David Cornelius of DVD Talk called the adaptation 'dreadfully dull', disapproving of director Hardy's and screenwriter Nelson's work.
• The miniseries features a character named Cabe Attucks, an escaped slave, who is not in Verne's original novel.

Plot

A mysterious vessel, initially mistaken for a giant narwhal, has been ramming and sinking ships. In response, the USS Abraham Lincoln is dispatched to hunt it down. On board are marine biologist Pierre Aronnax, harpooner Ned Land, and Cabe Attucks, an escaped slave. The submarine, the Nautilus, attacks the warship, and Pierre, Ned, and Cabe are thrown overboard. The Nautilus’s crew, commanded by Captain Nemo, rescues them. Back in port, the Abraham Lincoln is repaired, and the crew is presumed dead. Pierre’s widowed father, Thierry Aronnax, a bitter marine biologist who blames his son for his wife’s death in childbirth and resents that his own mistress preferred Pierre, joins the naval expedition.

Nemo is constructing an underwater domed city beneath the Atlantic, south of West Africa. To prevent earthquakes from endangering it, he plants a network of explosives to release all of Earth’s tectonic stress at once. A Chinese-looking pearl diver accidentally triggers one of these devices, and the Nautilus rescues her just in time. Pierre and Nemo’s daughter, Mara, develop a mutual attraction. After an accident destroys Pierre’s right hand, Nemo replaces it with a mechanical hand like his own.

The US Navy locates Nemo’s base by tracking a high concentration of Nautilus sightings. The Abraham Lincoln, now carrying Thierry, sails there. Ned Land’s sabotage, which kills him, combined with torpedoes fired from the Abraham Lincoln, forces the Nautilus to surface. As the crew emerges on deck, the warship’s Gatling guns mow them down.

Mara and a few others escape in a diving bell, but she is captured and held prisoner on the Abraham Lincoln. Thierry boards the Nautilus and shoots Nemo on sight. After a final confrontation between Pierre and his father on the Nautilus’s deck, the dying Nemo triggers a switch in his mechanical hand, detonating the submarine and destroying the Abraham Lincoln as well. Pierre is rescued by Cabe and the pearl diver, who have escaped in another diving bell.

Pierre’s written account of these events later reaches Jules Verne, who uses it as the basis for his novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas.