f-w-taylor
I read the reviews before watching this and was intrigued by how polarised they are. I'm somewhere in the middle - I was entertained by the movie and thought it was well cast and acted. The standards of production are good for a made-for-TV movie, and the effects are not exactly Avatar, but OK for 1999.The lack of faithfulness to Verne is irrelevant - they have to acknowledge him for the idea and theme, but there's no obligation or expectation to act out the book in every detail.The main weakness for me was the childish humour and the usual prudery in bathing scenes etc, It's funny what convention allows audiences to see and hear, or not. In summary, not a waste of time if you like this sort of thing, but pitched mainly at kids; it would have been more fun with a harder dramatic edge.
Ray Girvan
This is a grab bag of elements of the Verne story filled out with various Rice Burroughs staples: fights, captures and escapes surrounding a patriarchal tribe whose men dress caveman-style and whose flawlessly-complexioned women wear little leather skirts and bikini tops; Amazon warriors; humanoid lizards; and a seasoning of dinosaurs. The whole thing is given a weird gloss by filtering out greens - presumably a cheap way to get the blue-foliage jungles - so the whole thing is in a blue/brown/red palette. I sort of enjoyed it; but being in hospital the day after an appendix operation, I guess I wasn't in a critically demanding mood.
Marcus Eden-Ellis
Oh my, such a great tale so artlessly told. Verne, for those of you that don't know, is (or rather was)one of the true visionaries of science fiction literature. JTTCOTE is one of his evergreen tales that has been endlessly re-made and re-worked by Hollywood. It even spawned a long-forgotten 70's cartoon series.This film is does not serve the Verne's legacy well. There has clearly been money spent on it - some of the special effects are workmanlike - and a few of the c-list actors can turn in a decent performance when put to it. Here however, they are there for the paycheck and nothing more. I could live with that if they were at least working with a good script but everywhere you look there is cliché piled upon cliché and sloppy directing and production design.I guess if you really want to know about this film, watch it and see for yourself but I warn you now, it's about fifteen hours long. At least that is what it felt like! But I guess the best flavour of the piece comes from the fact that the women of an underground undiscovered tribe of natives wear make-up, speak English in a late 20th century idiom and shave their armpits with some kind of incredibly close shaver. And they dance disco style! All this in the nineteenth century...Go on, try it. It's one of those "so bad, it's good" type movies...
halo_67
The acting is overdone. The animation is weak at best. They try to make up for lack of visionary effects by attempting to overwhelm us with beautiful people with tons of sexual tension. The story itself is an adaptation from an amazing book. However the movie done in the 70's was far more entertaining. You would think that with the stunning advances of cinematography, even a B-rate movie such as this would be more aesthetically pleasing film than the actual tripe it is. I guess you get what you pay for when it comes to movies containing Treat Williams, or say, Lorenzo Lamas. My favorite part of the movie is when the ending credits rolled.
AD
