Mysterious Island

I said recently that I considered the 2005 Patrick Stewart adaptation of Mysterious Island to be the worst Jules Verne adaptation and I'd like to firmly retract that statement.

This version starring Lochlyn Munro and Gina Holden is an absolute abomination for a couple of reasons. For a start it's because it's simply bad, it's ugly, it's unoriginal, for the most part it's laughably written and acted and a film you'll have forgotten within mere moments of the credits rolling.

The second reason is the worst, this is supposed to be an adaptation of Jules Verne's classic! Now other adaptations have gone on tangents, featured characters and oversized monsters that weren't in the original novel but this version takes that to a whole new level. In no way shape or form is this Mysterious Island! Here we have portals, we have time travel, we have an entirely new background story for Nemo and instead of giant monsters we have Morlock looking antagonists! I don't know what they were thinking here but it's 5% Verne's work and 95% original and moronic.

It's films like this that underline my issue with senseless remakes, if you aren't going to respect the source material then why even call it an adaptation?

A regular on the Scyfy channel this is one to not only not watch but actively avoid especially if you enjoy Verne's works.

The Good:

Gina Holden

The Bad:

Some of the alterations from the source material are beyond moronic

Stock sound effects

Cringe inducing script

Mark Sheppard is wasted

I had some expectation why I wanted to watch this film. I had no information about it, except a line that this film is based on J. Verne's book. It started like a normal remake but turned to a surreal vision of a hurt brain about something. After ten minutes it was obvious that the original story and author has only a very loose connection to this film. The story does not worth more. The actors are forming unrealistic characters. It seems that they did their job only for the money without any efforts to play characters -if there is any at all. The director seems not to have minimal assumption about the story had to be filmed. In summary: Primitive story, no connection to the original book. The creators have stolen only a couple of names from J. Verne. Category "Z" actors, but is true that their level of play is comparable with the whole film. It is very difficult to understand who was able to give money for this. Waste of time even a minute. One star what I gave is exactly one star more than it worth, but there is no option for zero.

This film has it all...bad writing, bad direction, bad acting, some of the worst CGI ever and an ending that basically was the director yelling, "CUT, we're out of time".

March 1865. A group of Union soldiers escape from Confederate hands in a balloon, accompanied by their former Confederate captor. The balloon crashes on a sinister island, complete with strange malevolent creatures, pirates...and people from the year 2012.

Ostensibly based on Jules Verne's classic novel but, if it is, it must be very loosely based, as there is no way Jules Verne wrote even 5% of this crap. (Unfortunately, I haven't read Verne's novel, so can't comment with any authority on how closely this movie does follow the book). Bad in every way: plot, dialogue, acting. Even the historical references are inaccurate!

Monumentally cringeworthy. Avoid like the plague.

The island is mysterious. I'll give the movie credit for that, at least. And the mysteriousness of the island does manage to carry this for a while. The basic problem that I had with this, though, was that after a while I simply found myself not caring. The characters weren't at all sympathetic. None of them were sufficiently developed to really make me care about their fate, which is a big problem in a movie like this, since most of the story revolves around what's happening to the castaways.

The movie is obviously based on the Jules Verne story of the same name in which a group of Union soldiers steal a giant Confederate balloon in order to escape from Richmond near the end of the Civil War and get carried by the winds to the island. Obviously it's based very loosely on that story. I have only vague memories of the Verne story, but what I recall tells me that while the very basic outline is here, much of the original story is either left out or changed in this. And obviously, Verne having written the story in 1875, the addition of the Bermuda Triangle plot, and the crash of the airplane aren't from the Verne story at all, the former simply lending a paranormal feel to this, the latter being little more than an excuse to introduce two attractive young women to the group of castaways. The ending left me a bit dry and it left everything up in the air, whereas the Verne story had a much more definite ending.

For a while this is fine. It just falters mainly on the sense of indifference I had to the characters. If you don't care about the characters, you really don't care about the story. (4/10)