20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1997 Hallmark film) 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1997 Hallmark film) 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is a 1997 television film directed by Michael Anderson and starring Ben Cross as Captain Nemo. It premiered on March 23, 1997. Based on the novel of the same name by Jules Verne, it is most notable for replacing the character of Professor Aronnax's manservant, Conseil, with the Professor's daughter, Sophie, who disguises herself as a boy so that she may accompany her father aboard the USS "Abraham Lincoln"; she becomes the apex of a love triangle involving Captain Nemo and Ned the harpooner. The film was
Captain Nemo the January Uprising; but Verne's editor Pierre-Jules Hetzel feared a book ban in the Russian market and offending a French ally, the Russian Empire, and had Verne obscure Nemo's motivation in the first book. In the second book of "Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea", Nemo comes close to revealing his Indian ancestry, though this is not obvious except in retrospect, where he saves a Ceylonese pearl-fisher in the Gulf of Mannar. "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" was written between 1869 and 1870 and records the voyages of the "Nautilus" between 1866 and 1868. "The Mysterious Island" was written