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
Jules Verne magazine. (The manuscript, believed lost for some time after Verne's death, was finally published in 1994.) The relationship between publisher and writer changed significantly around 1869, when Verne and Hetzel were brought into conflict over the manuscript for "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea". Verne had initially conceived of the submariner Captain Nemo as a Polish scientist whose acts of vengeance were directed against the Russians who had killed his family during the January uprising. Hetzel, not wanting to alienate the lucrative Russian market for Verne's books, demanded that Nemo be made an enemy of the slave trade, a situation