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
The Fabulous World of Jules Verne in which its heroes directly acknowledged their fondness for reading Verne. The second of Zeman's Verne-based films was "Vynález zkázy"; the later ones were "The Stolen Airship", based on "Two Years' Vacation", and "On the Comet", based on "Hector Servadac". The main literary source material for "Vynález zkázy" was Verne's 1896 novel "Facing the Flag". However, rather than a straightforward literal adaptation of the novel, Zeman conceived the film as if the story were being retold by one of its characters, the young engineer Simon Hart. Moreover, since "Facing the Flag" included many memorable Vernian motifs—including submarines, volcanoes, mysterious figures