Captain Nemo sails onto the small screen once again in this all-new, hugely entertaining and handsome Disney-produced Victorian-era adventure series, based on Jules Verne’s classic novel, 20,000 Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

In the grand Disney tradition, Nautilus is a handsome production aimed at a family audience with great characters, hissable villains and plenty of humour to balance the frequent action.

Shazad Latif gives a star-making performance as the mercurial captain of the fabulous submarine, Nautilus as Nemo, also known as Dakkar, an Indian prince seeking revenge against the British empire for the murder of his wife and family.

Along with a ragtag crew drawn from the four corners of the globe, Nemo goes on a whistle-stop ocean voyage of adventure ripped from Verne’s stories featuring giant squid, the lost city of Atlantis being trapped in polar ice, disease, and underwater volcanoes. There are gun fights, a horse chase, a mini-revolution, a whale hunt, depth charges, a cute dog, a stowaway and a fantastic game of cricket.

Unlike many streaming shows which are often guilty of dragging out the story, Nautilus never stops piling on the peril and is never afraid to put the cast through the mixer. Plus there’s a welcome willingness among the scriptwriters to kill off the Nautilus crew. This keeps the audience on our toes, and I’m all the more grateful for it.

Nemo made his big screen debut over a hundred years ago in Hollywood’s 1916 epic and broadly faithful adaptation of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which combined Verne’s novel with its sequel, The Mysterious Island. You can read my review of the movie here. And it’s fascinating to see where Nautilus cleaves and strays from Verne’s work.

Verne wrote fifty-four stories in his Voyages Extraordinaires, and Nemo was conceived as the ‘villain-of-the-week’, a revenge-driven exile who captures a professor, his servant and a harpooner and takes them on a global trip before Nemo and the Nautilus are lost at sea. 

After having been played by acting luminaries such as James Mason and by British thespian aristocrats Michal Caine and Patrick Stewart, the villain of Jules Verne’s classic underwater adventure is now more suitably cast. It’s only the second time in Hollywood history this has happened, after an adaptation of Alan Moore’s graphic novel The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. In that, Nemo was a supporting character, in Nautilus, he is the main man. And very much not the villain.

With his long black hair, open white baggy shirts and semi-permanent scowl, he’s every inch the brooding Victorian hero. A romantic, sexy and swashbuckling figure. Albeit one who is brooding, suspicious and capable of making the wrong decisions. He’s knowingly described as a pirate.

Verne wasn’t keen on including women in his adventure stories and none exist in 20,000 leagues. Hollywood introduced women the first chance it got. In Nautilus, the castaway professor and his servant are swapped out for the delightfully named Englishwoman, Humility Lucas, and Loti, her French chaperone and knife-wielding bodyguard.

Humility is a headstrong young Englishwoman with porcelain skin and red hair who’s betrothed to a wealthy and spoilt fiancé. Before the audience can say, ‘Kate Winslet’, Humility finds herself on a sinking ship where she and Loti are rescued by Nemo.

The Australian actress Georgia Flood develops a terrific chemistry with Latif and a romance of sorts begins to bud, hampered by Humility’s not unreasonable attempts to escape the Nautilus.

I binged the series and came to love the crew, due in no small part to how skillfully written it is. It doesn’t hurt that the cast are are an engaging and attractive bunch. The episodic structure of the novel, 20,000 Leagues, lends itself to a cliff-hanging TV series, and the exciting first episode doesn’t hang around waiting for the action to start. 

Episode one doesn’t lack action and also works hard to establish the various characters, the period setting and so on. This allows the second episode to surf on a wave of its hard work. By the swashbuckling third episode, I was fully on board with Nemo and his loveable crew.

A sign of a great show is not knowing which of the characters is your favourite. I changed my affections several times. And British veteran thesp, Richard E Grant protesting ‘I do not get shot’, is a treat.

Nautilus is best understood as ‘steampunk Robin Hood on a submarine’. Nemo is an aristocrat cheated out of his inheritance who gathers about him a motley bunch of renegades and swashbuckles his way to vengeance against the corrupt, arrogant, treacherous and hissable British authorities. And if the English aristocracy has made it easy for filmmakers to portray them as villains, well, they’ve only themselves to blame.

Verne wasn’t eager to challenge the social hierarchy of the day; his heroes are white, male and European. This is decidedly not true in Nautilus. And Verne’s Nautilus crew are nameless and faceless, giving the makers of Nautilus the series a free hand in crafting a band of allies drawn from the templates of Maid Marion, Little John and the rest and given life by an international cast. And after all, reimagining Robin Hood in space didn’t do any harm to the popularity of the BBC’s seminal sci-fi series, Blake’s 7. 

A hallmark of that show was its design, and Nautilus goes all guns blazing on that front. The costumes and locations are wonderful, the retro steampunk diving suits and laser rifles are a joy, and the dreadnought Is a mighty iron battleship bristling with guns and belching black smoke. The giant squid is a brilliantly tentacled and vast underwater beast, direct from the warped imagination of famed horror writer H.P. Lovecraft.

Questions of legitimacy, identity, parentage heritage, ownership, friendship and loyalty are raised and examined. Nautilus shares Verne’s love of the natural world and flexes its eco-credentials with a thrilling rescue of a whale.

The main villain is not the British throne per se but the East India Company, a global company more powerful and with a larger army than the British Empire. This distinction allows the series to throw shade at modern global tech companies and how far they’ll go to protect their intellectual property. Nemo designed the Nautilus and, having stolen it from the East India Company, and now ‘the company’, as it’s frequently referred to, wants it back.

The series is swashbuckling family fun of the sort one would expect Disney to excel at, and in tone and scale, there’s more than a hint of Disney’s blockbuster Pirates of the Caribbean film franchise in here.

All of which makes it all the more surprising Disney sold the series in a cost-cutting exercise to Amazon’s streaming service instead of broadcasting it themselves. It’s not as if a constant diet of superhero and Star Wars content is drawing in new subscribers. 

Disney’s loss is very much Amazon’s gain, especially as this is more fun and engaging than the streaming behemoth’s flagship show, Rings of Power.

It’s possible Nautilus may suffer from the ‘John Carter effect’, where the source novel has been ripped off so often that the true adaptation itself feels like the rip-off of earlier, less faithful work. If Nautilus seems to borrow much from series such as Star Trek, it’s probably because that and other sci-fi borrow so much from Verne’s storytelling. And visually, it’s worth remembering that from the earliest Flash Gordon serials, spaceships were envisioned as submarines in space.

Verne wrote a series of 57 adventure stories and Nemo was very much just a villain of the week, and Verne was happy to seemingly kill him off at the end of 20,000 Leagues. Verne was a white middle-class former stockbroker who wasn’t interested in challenging the social order of the world he lived in. He wrote stories celebrating colonialism. I wonder what he’d think of Nemo dying a villain and living long enough in popular culture to become the hero?

Not only is this my favourite Nemo adaptation, Nautilus stands alongside the 1980s Robin Of Sherwood series as a brilliant outlaw adventure. Nautilus is available in Sweden and France and is reported to be launching in the UK on October 25th. This is one show you don’t want to miss.

ENDS

My latest gamebook, Nemo’s Fury 3: Death Fort, will be launched as a paperback and ebook on 25th October to coincide with the launch of Amazon’s new, Disney-produced TV series, Nautilus.

To celebrate the launch, the paperback and ebook editions of Nemo’s Fury 3: Death Fort are available at a launch price of £6.95 and £2.29 respectively.

Join the legendary Captain Nemo and his companions on a desperate mission to avert global war.

You and Nemo, along with a cyborg and a former slave, are stranded in a remote naval base. The submarine Nautilus is lost, and you face a perilous journey across a wasteland to Fort Shevchenko, a military port where you can obtain a new submarine.

Travelling by foot or atomic tank, you’ll face many dangers on the way, such as enemy marines, automated defences, the fierce creatures of the wasteland, stray missiles and minefields. And once you arrive at Fort Shevchenko, how warm a welcome will you receive?

Roll your statistics and choose your supplies. Success is far from certain, and death is never far away in this exciting and fast-paced adventure. Get your copy here!

Nemo’s Fury 2: Octo War is the thrilling sequel. Join the legendary Captain Nemo and his crew as they try to rescue a stricken submarine and avert a global war!

Nemo’s Fury is the thrilling new gamebook, available exclusively from Amazon. Join the mysterious Captain Nemo on board his remarkable submarine the Nautilus and experience a wild voyage of monsters, mayhem and murder! Available as paperback and ebook.

Captain Nemo and the Nautilus has 40 amazing scenes to colour! Perfect underwater adventure fun! Get yours here!

You can order your copy of the book with this button: Nemo’s Fury 2: Octo War is the thrilling sequel. Join the legendary Captain Nemo and his crew as they try to rescue a stricken submarine and avert a global war!