Mysterious Island

Look, I grew up watching Pertwee and Baker's Dr Who and can enjoy them still today, so for me, these FX look pretty darn special!

The only thing letting this one down really is the pantomime style performance of Vinnie Jones as the head pirate and story's principal antagonist. Although by now he had got a lot of acting experience under his belt, seems just a little too self-conscious in the role to have the confidence to attack it with balls-out hutzpah - this is a part where you really need to go big, or go home!

Kyle MacLachlan and Patrick Stewart are uniformly strong in anything they do and both score well here. It was also a joy to see Roy Marsden revelling in the escapist hijinks here, as his face was so often on TV when I was growing up and he's not used as often as his talent deserves these days.

If you embrace the silliness and laugh at the cheesier moments, without trying to compare it to Jules Verne's book there's much to enjoy here!

This has got to be one of the lousiest special-effects movies I've ever seen. It reminds me of B-grade '50s movies. It is unforgivable that the production was so lazy in this era of realistic CGI effects. The most atrocious part of the film was the attack in the cave of spiders. They looked like limited-animation cutouts. The poor effects throughout the film spoiled any experience of it.

Aerial shots were obviously filmed in front of a green screen. The balloon moved unrealistically against a backdrop of sky.

Time scale is wrong. How did these guys travel from the Eastern US to the Pacific in one night? It seemed they fitted out the limestone cave in a day and night, etc. Totally lazy effort.

How did top actors like Patrick Stewart and Vinnie Jones get roped into this mess? I love Stewart but this role forces him to sleep-walk. The best part of the movie was Jones' accent and attitude.

This movie started out reasonably well, and it had a excellent cast.It is very well acted by the leads but all the pirates should have their actors guilds cards taken from them.

The story is a classic, even when very artistic license is taken as in this production.

So it had two positive points, the cast and the J.Verne story line.

Sadly it is all down hill from there. I am taking into account that this is made for TV, but even so, the pirates were a joke and absolutely cartoon like. The special effects removed you out of the movie every time you started to get involved in it.They were pathetic.

If this movie was an hour long I might suggest you sit through it, but at 170 min, it was not a fun experience. I wanted to like this, and really the actors did pretty good, but I just can not recommend it.

Don't waste your time with this. If I had known that this was a made for TV movie, with fade outs for commercials, and a "to be continued" pause in the middle of the DVD, I would not have rented it. It was a waste of 2 hrs & 45 minutes of my time. I do believe that the special effects were supposed to be cheesy, as if to imitate the 1961 original film. If that was the case, they didn't even match up to that and that movie is 45 years old for crying out loud! But go rent the original. It was much better. Even Jason and the Argonaut movies hands down had 100 times better effects than this movie. Patrick Stewart, one of my favorite actors of today and the main reason that I rented it, was fair at best. You could tell that he was just walking through this role and suffering along with the rest of us. And he sure was not at all interested in vying for an Oscar or Emmy. Yikes!! Oh, and did I mention that this was a totally useless movie? Stay away......a galaxy far, far away!

This is indeed an awful production, and it has nothing to do with Verne.

The five castaways in Verne's book are Cyrus Smith (the brilliant military engineer--who for some reason or other is called Cyrus Harding in most of the English-language versions), Gideon Spillett (the newspaper reporter), Neb (ex-slave still working for ex-owner Smith, who freed him), Pencroff (a sailor), and Harbert (youngster, son of Pencroff's late captain, for whom Pencroff is acting as guardian). Verne is very good at sketching these guys' personalities and making them come alive for us, and all his careful nuancing is thrown out the window in this production.

Why these female characters? The novel has NO female characters, and it assumes five men can live on a deserted island for three years and never think about women or sex---the subject never comes up. If the producers didn't think that believable, they should have written their own damn story and not pretended to be dramatizing Verne's.

Yes, Captain Nemo does appear in the novel, but he's absolutely nothing like he is in this production.

There's a reformed pirate named Ayrton in the book, but other than that he has nothing in common with the reformed pirate Blake in this version.

My respect for Stewart is a lot less after knowing that he would consent to be in this ridiculous production.