20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1997 Village Roadshow film) way to Jules Verne, who uses it as a basis for his novel "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea". The "Nautilus" gets its power by extracting the sun's heat from the sea water: this is impossible technology, and the movie wrongly calls it hydroelectricity. "DVD Verdict" wrote the miniseries "comes off as incomplete", but praised Michael Caine's performance as Captain Nemo. David Cornelius of "DVD Talk" called the adaptation "dreadfully dull", disapproving of director Hardy's and screenwriter Nelson's work. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1997 Village Roadshow film) 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is a 1997 two-part television miniseries produced
Cultural influence of Jules Verne Cultural influence of Jules Verne Jules Verne (1828–1905), the French writer best known for his "Voyages extraordinaires" series, has had a wide influence in both scientific and literary fields. The pioneering submarine designer Simon Lake credited his inspiration to "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea", and his autobiography begins "Jules Verne was in a sense the director-general of my life." William Beebe, Sir Ernest Shackleton, and Robert Ballard found similar early inspiration in the novel, and Jacques Cousteau called it his "shipboard bible". The aviation pioneer Alberto Santos-Dumont named Verne as his favorite author and the inspiration for his own