The American Civil War: Trying to escape a Confederate ambush, Union Captain
Harding (Lochlyn Munro) takes his battalion out of the danger zone via a
balloon that just happened to be around, and now all they have to deal
with is Pencroft (J.D. Evermore), an especially ambitious Confederate who
has clung onto the balloon to take them captive single-handedly - not much
of a problem, right? But then the balloon flies through a time portal
right onto an island in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle, God knows
when. Soon after them, two girls from 2012, capable Julia Fogg (Gina
Holden) and her partygirl sister Abby (Susie Abromeit) crashland their
plane on the island as well, and while Harding, his men and the girls are
still trying to figure out what's going on, they are already attacked by
cannibalistic mutants, giant octopusses living in the sea around the
island, and of course there's a volcano too, bound to break out every
minute now. Harding's men die like flies of course, with the Confederate
soldier dying an especially nasty and cowardly death, but Harding, the
girls and the token black man (Edrick Browne) survive everything pretty
much unscathed. They also find a mansion that apparently belongs to
Captain Nemo (William Morgan Sheppard), whose submarine Nautilus was once
the terror of the Seven Seas, but who eventually has created a temporal
anomaly dealing with elements beyond his comprehension, and who has thus
created the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle, which is essentially some
sort of time portal. Interestingly, Harding is very quick to pick up the
science behind the Bermuda Triangle, and figures a way how to create a
time machine. But the key element is with the mutants, who are actually
Nemo's former crew. Without wanting to bore you without too much
details: Nemo of course gives his life dying a hero's death, but
everything else ends happily ... A film that starts exciting
enough with the Union soldiers' escape ... to then quickly lose all steam
when they fly through a time portal. Now I don't know who came up with the
idea that Jules Verne's novel as such was not science fiction enough and
figured it'd be a good idea to include a time portal, but that's besides
the point even. What's really annoying is that nothing really is made out
of this idea, it doesn't really further the story, and even the clash of
the Civil War soldiers and modern women lacks any and all real impact. On
top of that, the science the time portal is based on seems more derived
from Doctor
Who than based on any sound time travel theories. But even
aside from the timetravel nonsense, this is a film that fails to capture
its audience: Basically, the story is stripped of all its creepy elements,
and reduced to a formula action plot - in other words, there is nothing
mysterious about this island. Even the mutants remain disappointingly
bland. And the octopusses are not given enough room to develop. And
Captain Nemo, a tragic figure in the book, seems to be more like a benign
granduncle in this one. And where has the fun playing with
retro-futuristic (I think it's called steampunk these days) inventions? To
sum it up in a word, a disappointment!
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