I know this film was shown on local TV when I was a kid, but I can't remember whether I watched it or not; seeing it now, considering how utterly forgettable it is, I still don't know – so I counted it as a first viewing! There have been several films featuring the title character, a creation of visionary French author Jules Verne; these include: 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA (1954; with James Mason in the role), MASTER OF THE WORLD (1961; Vincent Price), MYSTERIOUS ISLAND (1961; Herbert Lom), CAPTAIN NEMO AND THE UNDERWATER CITY (1969; Robert Ryan) and THE MYSTERIOUS ISLAND OF CAPTAIN NEMO (1973; Omar Sharif).This version stars Academy Award winner Jose' Ferrer. However, even if the premise itself isn't half-bad – awakened from suspended animation in his submarine, "The Nautilus", and finding himself in modern times, Nemo adopts all his ingenuity to aid the U.S. Navy in defeating megalomaniac scientist Burgess Meredith – it emerges as easily his most infantile adventure yet! For instance: five seconds into the film, Meredith's assistant – donning a steel mask – rants that "The World Shall Be Ours!"); equally hilarious are the zealous gesticulations of the similarly decked-out midget, whose task it is to fire The Professor's all-important "Delta Beam" - and how about those android-type minions aboard Meredith's vessel who never seem to do much of anything?! Ferrer manages to maintain his dignity throughout, but Meredith is an embarrassment (in what is virtually a retread of his Penguin characterization from the 1960s BATMAN TV series and film) where the budget was so tight – mostly invested in bland production design and shoddy special effects, no doubt, and both evidently influenced by STAR WARS (1977) – that, apparently, they couldn't even afford him a decent costume (he looks positively idiotic wearing a tie in a sub)! The supporting cast includes Mel Ferrer (playing a saboteur in the vein of Joan Fontaine from another Irwin Allen production, VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA [1961], and who engages in a swashbuckling routine with his namesake inside the engine-room of "The Nautilus"), Lynda Day George (unsurprisingly, she's the only female character around) and Horst Buchholz (as the King Of Atlantis – for whatever reason, Nemo is obsessed with locating the famed Lost Continent).By the way, having been reduced from a three-part mini-series for theatrical exhibition, the film obviously feels choppy – though one is still able to discern where one episode ended and another began.

The Amazing Captain Nemo is a movie not worth searching out, but definitely worth watching if it's on TV late at night, when you don't take everything that is shown very seriously anymore. The movie has a deliciously nonsensical story about 2 Navy-commando's who accidentally find Captain Nemo and free him from stasis. After a 100 years, the Nautilus is still light years ahead of other submarines in terms of technology. When a mad scientist threatens the world in exchange for a ransom, Captain Nemo's help gets asked, even though he really wants to continue his search for Atlantis.The movie is full of over-wrought cheesy dialogue, over-acting, and unbelievable technology, but that's really the movie's charm. The mad scientist's dialogue could be used, line-for-line, as samples in techno-songs; that's how campy it is. Jose Ferrer is really the right man for the role. Although I know him more for his serious roles in secret intelligence movies, he plays the role of the larger-than-life Nemo fantastically. A fun movie to watch on a bored Friday night.

Captain Nemo is still alive in 1978.The Amazing Captain Nemo (aka three episode TV series The Return Of Captain Nemo) is an odd ball mix of TV's Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1964), TV's Batman (1966) and Star Wars (1977). This show is totally unique. There has never been anything like this ever before where these three classic titles all come together so well. I was just 12 in 1978 when this appeared on Australian TV in 1978. I had spent the last few years of my life watching Irwin Allen sci-fic TV like Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and Lost In Space but they were all afternoon re-runs of something that was made in another decade. Nemo was NEW!Even today I remember the constant TV advertising that played for seven days and seven nights before the show screened! Then on a Saturday night it appeared and one of the characters even mentions the year as being 1978, which really pushed the point that it was current. I seem to remember enjoying the show at the time but I was perhaps a bit too young to like the well spoken lines of Jose Ferrer as Captain Nemo and Burgess Meredith as the Batman-ish bad guy. Seeing the sub encounter a force field and having the crew get frozen in time was interesting to a 12 year old. But now let me move on to my adult reaction ....Never dull for a second. Outstanding Richard LaSalle score.The not perfect submarine miniatures do the job (better than having CGI).The acting/dialogue from the whole cast is first class. Not a single dud cast member, they all shine! It has a sense of playful fun not seen in Irwin Allen's City Beneath The Sea (1971) and other Allen TV movies.Don't expect the Captain Nemo of 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea (1954) or the Mysterious Island (1961). This is Jose Ferrer's fun loving version of the character that reminds me of his work in the movie Cyrano de Bergerac (1950).In a nutshell: don't listen to the critics of this film (aka three episode TV series), who cares if Irwin Allen took his name off it, if you love Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and 1966 Batman, you will love this 1978 take on Captain Nemo!

A very fun bad movie. Jose Ferrer (who played Emporer Shaddam IV in the fake video version of Dune) was the only good actor in this film. I saw this for the first time on TV in the late eighties in Woburn MA. I love submarine shows, fact and fiction, and my friends and I were heckling bad movies long before MST3K did it professionally. Professor Cunningham is the world's most senile supervillain. Tor the xenophobic psychic android was hilarious with his "Aliens must die!" lines. I swear that Cunningham's sub the Raven looked like it was made from Space:1999 Eagle parts. When Mr. Miller said that,"The U.S. government is not a commercial enterprise" I howled with laughter. Also laughed when Miller held up a Betamax videotape (another case of superior marketing [VHS] beating out superior technology [Beta], like Microsoft's brilliant marketing of crappy software, or the soap opera-like addictiveness of the WWE). Nemo's submarine the Nautilus was an incredible anachronism, psychedelic nuclear fission reactor, stealth projector, laser cannon, force field, 120 knots top speed (I believe our fastest subs today go almost 40 knots), and a crush depth deeper than anything other than the Bathyscape Trieste (which reached the deepest part of the oceans in 1960 with 2 crewmen aboard). Good guys fired blue stun lasers while bad guys fired red kill shots. Tor had the best handgun, 5 settings, stun, kill, 'freeze', 'thaw', force field. They even slowed down some Star Wars music for a corridor fight scene! The Atlantean King's two top advisors set off my gaydar. Apparently the formula for Nemo's laser beam is only about 10 characters long, according to Cunningham's brain tap, like wow man. I give this a 10 as a bad movie!