L'île mystérieuse

Did anyone else notice that Patrick Stewart was not actually on location in Thailand with the rest of the cast. All his scenes were in a studio or against a 'Blue' screen, even when appearing to be in scenes with other actors - probably the best Special Effect in this film. Perhaps he did not realise how bad the film really was as he was not really there.

Special effects reminded me of Jason and the Argonauts (1963), although not as realistic.

It's difficult to rate the film out of 10. If you take it as a serious film it rates very low, but if you think of it as a comedy then it could be rated quite highly.

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!

Straight off the bat let me say this is a low 3/10, I'm being generous on this one.

Standing at three hours in length this very very very very very very loose adaptation of the Jules Verne classic Mysterious Island is a sight to behold for all the wrong reasons.

On paper it has everything going for it, it's based on the works of Jules Verne and stars Patrick Stewart, Kyle MacLachlan and Vinnie Jones..........okay forget about that last one.

So what went wrong? Well considering the cast the whole thing looks so very cheap, the cgi is dreadful and many of the costumes look they've been ripped from a run of the mill 5 buck costume shop.

The acting is such that they just don't want to be there, Vinnie Jones is worse than he's ever been. Let's make clear I have nothing against him, I think he has his place in the industry and he was hilarious in Eurotrip (2004) but right here is a performance so bad, so tacky I can't put it into mere words.

And then there is just how loose of an adaptation it is. This simply isn't in anyway shape or form the Mysterious Island, it's hard to even call this an adaptation because the content has been overhauled to such an extent you could easily have called it something else and nobody would have compared it to Jules Vernes work.

It makes you wonder why they bother doing that. Regardless when you take all those things into consideration it's hard to see this as anything but an embarrassment with a cast who look out of place in this travesty.

The Good:

Patrick Stewart

The Bad:

Yet another not even remotely loyal loose adaptation

Vinnie Jones really hams it up

Cast are simply too good for this

Shoddy cgi

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.

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!