Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea the book from the initial concept is a portrait of Tadeusz Kościuszko, a Polish national hero, leader of the uprising against Russia in 1794, with an inscription in Latin: "Finis Poloniae!" ("The end of Poland!"). Margaret Drabble argues that "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" anticipated the ecology movement and shaped the French avant-garde. Theodore L. Thomas in 1961 said that "there is not a single bit of valid speculation" in the novel and that "none of its predictions has come true". He described the depictions of the diving gear, scenes, and the "Nautilus" as "pretty bad, behind the times
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea an extensive bibliography, appendices and a wide-ranging introduction studying the novel from a literary perspective. In particular, his original research on the two manuscripts studies the radical changes to the plot and to the character of Nemo forced on Verne by the first publisher, Jules Hetzel. The national origin of Captain Nemo was changed in most movie realizations; in nearly all picture-based works following the book Nemo was made into a European. However, he was represented as an Indian by Omar Sharif in the 1973 European miniseries "The Mysterious Island". Nemo is also depicted as Indian in a silent film