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Nautilus Will Drive Jules Verne Purists Crazy
Less so those who are just looking for some family-friendly adventure 20,000 leagues under the sea.
In The Mysterious Island, readers learn that Nemo was an Indian prince named Dakkar who was highly educated and fought the British for the independence of his territory, Bundelkund, and for India overall (which Verne’s narrator describes as a “long degraded and heathen country,” with citizens whose “ignorance and gross superstition made them the facile tools of their designing chiefs”). In that discovery mode, Nautilus feels like an amalgam of Xena: Warrior Princess; Our Flag Means Death; and the Indiana Jones, Pirates of the Caribbean, and King Kong franchises, with inexplicable leviathans and silly crew high jinks. It’s basically the Star Trek formula that Verne came up with a century and a half ago, and it works; the series’ jaunts to islands with gigantic bugs and Norse civilizations with strict codes of honor are immersive and entertaining.
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