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Saw 'Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea' as somebody who considers the cast very talented and who has liked some of Irwin Allen's other films (i.e. 'The Towering Inferno' and 'The Poseidon Adventure' that he produced). The premise was great also.

'Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea' unfortunately is not one of Allen's better efforts though and doesn't live up to its great premise. It's one of the more famous submarine films but for me not one of the best ones. This saddens me to say that, absolutely no vindictiveness here, because there was a lot of talent on board, who can go wrong with Walter Pidgeon, Peter Lorre and Joan Fontaine. Can see why some people find it entertaining and why others find it underwhelming, but it generally didn't do much for me.

Starting with the positives, the submarine is quite rightly the star here and a very big one it is too. It is aided by some colourful and atmospheric cinematography. The lively music score also adds a lot and the theme song is a memorable one and a deserving one.

The film's underwater sequences look pretty good still and while ridiculous the climax is entertaining. Generally the cast are not used to their full potential, but Walter Pidgeon is good in the lead, while Michael Ansara and Barbara Eden add some charm to the proceedings.

Peter Lorre on the other hand is criminally underutilised and looked like he was in ill health. Like Joan Fontaine a lot, but she was out of her depth and out of place while the rest of the cast were better off not being there. While the underwater sequences don't look too bad, they generally lack excitement and go on far longer than they needed to, also not placed very well. Some of the effects, like the octopus, look really hokey now.

Furthermore, the pace tends to be ponderous, trimming the underwater sequences would have helped, the film is too long and the direction is stodgy. Add to that a silly and too talky script and a story that lacks suspense, surprises and excitement and falls on the wrong side of daft and nonsensical constantly and you have a far from terrible but very problematic film.

Recommended for a one-time watch, but there is not enough to make me want to see it on repeat viewings. 5/10 Bethany Cox

I had ordered Voyage to The Bottom of The Sea on DVD and at 3:00 in the morning I found myself watching it. Okay, the idea of the Van Allen radiation belt catching on fire is silly, but it's just the premise for a really good sci-fi adventure film that I wish I could've seen in the theaters on a wide screen. But the rich colors on the DVD and Dolby sound is a good substitute for the real thing.

In looking at it, I can't help but compare the movie with the series that followed as there are some of the actors from the movie who ended up in the show. Seeing this Lee Crane constantly arguing and second-guessing Admiral Nelson is a little disturbing, yet the movie inspired one of the best sci-fi series of the '60s. And the movie itself, like Fantastic Voyage, shows great creativity. Irwin Allen is always being underestimated by people with 60 second attention spans, but this movie shows how much of a creative artist that Allen was.

I gladly give this movie 8/10

I still remember seeing this film at movie theaters way back when I was a lad. Of course I didn't hear very much of it due to all the shrieks and squeals from the teenage girls in the audience over Frankie Avalon. That curiously enough didn't matter because Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea is a very visual film.

It might seem a little old hat today, but we've been through two more generations that have seen the United States Navy become an atomic fleet of submarines and surface carriers. It was only seven years earlier, in 1955 that the U.S.S. Nautilus was launched as our first atomic submarine. In homage to that wonderful visionary Jules Verne who foresaw atomic power one hundred years earlier the Navy named it after that famous undersea ship of Verne's great novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. The nuclear submarine was a wondrous thing in 1961.

The idea of a nuclear power submarine was the brainchild of Admiral Hyman Rickover. Rickover was a tough minded s.o.b. who usually got whatever he wanted by any mean necessary including bullying. Hard to believe that the gentlemanly Walter Pigeon could play him, but he did and well as Admiral Harry Nelson, the ersatz Rickover.

What's happened here is that the Van Allen radiation belt that surrounds the Earth has caught fire and temperatures are climbing all over the world. The planet is doomed, but Walter Pigeon's got an idea to save it. Fire a missile and seed the belt with more radiation, kind of a nuclear backfire and the blaze will end.

A lot of people are telling him it won't work, but Pigeon brushes them all aside. The only two who have faith in him are his assistants played by Peter Lorre and Barbara Eden. But our intrepid admiral pushes through.

Of course the U.S.S. Seaview encounters all kinds of obstacles along the way, but that's the rest of the story.

The cast does very well for itself and young Frankie Avalon as a junior officer comes off rather nicely. Frankie sings over the title credits, but during the movie plays a trumpet. Avalon in fact was a trumpet virtuoso and a singing career was an afterthought. The fickle finger of fate.

Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea still a nice science fiction adventure even though it is dated.

Ever wonder where "Star Trek" and all the other Sci-Fi series got there starts?

I used to watch the series as a kid back when the UK only had 3 television channels, and they were offline more than online back in the 1960s when this was the State-Of-The-Art.

Now, over 40 years after it was made and most of the cast are either dead or retired, this movie is still standing the test of Time.

The plot is a little silly, with glaring holes that submarines could be driven through, and the acting is a little on the hammy-side sometimes, but for an entertaining look at how movie-makers in the 50s/60s thought the future might look, this is an excellent peek into how Hollywood was thinking at the time.

The cast seem to mesh well together around stilted dialogue ("Military Police swim like fish - it's part of their training"), and the prodigious talents of the likes of Joan Fontaine and Peter Lorre are somewhat reined-in, but overall this movie is still great to watch over four decades after they made it.

A solid piece of science fiction that's fairly dated, "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea" was a film from the old school of exposition film making. Half docu-drama and half science-fiction, Allen's production makes an effort to mix the world of tomorrow, as it was perceived in the late 50s and early 60s, with then contemporary drama. The result is somewhat stilted, and immature in a very innocent sort of way, but worth a look if you need some vintage sci-fi on your screen.

The exposition of what Irwin Allen felt "the future" of scientific defense in the realm of the world's oceans feels like a Disney documentary. The drama almost seems as an afterthought to the technology being depicted (which I'm sure isn't too far off the mark), and doesn't really ever click in.

An egalitarian para-military that is the crew of the USOS Seaview, was no doubt an inspiration for the Star Trek franchise as it was first conceived, as were probably the scientific functions of a government vessel manned by what is ostensibly a crew serving aboard a vessel whose role is part defensive and part scientific. It is in this capacity that the story takes shape, and challenges sub and crew as the fate of mankind hangs in the balance.

Scientific loopholes abound: Ice floats (the breakup of an iceberg would not produce sinking chinks of ice), radiation doesn't catch fire (the Van Allen belt is speculated to be a result of USAF atmospheric nuclear tests in the 1950s), the most advanced attack subs today can not dive beyond 1300 feet, active sonar is rarely used, etc. etc. etc. But, if you can get by all that, and forgive some of the earlier film making stylings in this film, then it's worth a look.

It's not classic vintage sci-fi in the conventional sense, but one clearly sees how it influenced generations of sci-fi films to come afterwards, as well as spawning the eventual TV series that evolved from this film.

Give it a chance, but don't expect too much. If you're a younger viewer reading this review, then you'll probably get somewhat impatient with it. Even so, try to keep in mind the kind of film it is, and the time in which it was made.