One big difference between the movie and book is that the Nautilus in the movie is not battery powered, but actually a nuclear submarine and Professor Aronnax is far more interested in Nemo’s discovery of nuclear energy and the potential good it could do civilization than he is in studying fish and other underwater wonders and it turns out that the purpose Nemo has in mind for Aronnax is that he might allow the professor to share his secret of nuclear energy with the world. James Mason, Kirk Douglas, Peter Lorre, Paul Lukas He also tries to escape when he is allowed to go ashore on an island, but is chased back by cannibals.

One of Land’s schemes is to fill bottles with messages about the location of Captain Nemo’s island base (which they found on a chart in Nemo’s room) and send them out into the ocean. In the meantime, he shows Aronnax the submarine and how it works while Ned Land and Conseil scheme and plot to escape. He has a potential purpose in mind for Professor Aronnax. The captain of the Nautilus (James Mason) at first threatens to kill them, but relents when he sees how Aronnax is willing to die with his friends rather than be spared alone. But what they encounter instead is a submarine and when they fall overboard, along with bombastic and hot-headed harpooner Ned Land (Kirk Douglas), they climb aboard the submarine, the Nautilus. Professor Aronnax (Paul Lukas) and his servant, Conseil (Peter Lorre), go on a sea voyage to locate a mysterious sea creature that is destroying ships. The essential story is the same in the movie as it is in the book. In the documentary to the DVD, director Richard Fleischer said that when he read the book, he realized that the best way to adapt the story was to treat it like a jail break on a submarine and try to make everything feel claustrophobic. It is a much tighter story than the book, which is very episodic. My cousin had very strong opinions about the film: she loved the squid and she hated Kirk Douglas.īut I enjoyed it very much. I knew of it more by reputation than anything else. I have some dim memory of seeing Kirk Douglas playing with a seal when I was a child, but I must not have seen the whole thing. Strangely enough, I never saw it before last week. After reading the book, I had to see Disney’s film adaptation of 20,000 Leagues Under Sea.

2000 leagues under the sea book