Roush Review: Shallow Escapism Aboard the ‘Nautilus’

Matt Roush June 28, 2025, 11:00 am

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Nautilus

Matt's Rating:

Finding Nemo — Captain Nemo, that is — in the enjoyably cheesy underwater adventure Nautilus, loosely based on Jules Verne’s classic Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, feels like a throwback to an earlier era of harmless escapism, reminiscent of the shows I was enthralled with as a kid, like Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and even Lost in Space. (This 19th-century submarine’s crew includes its own version of Will Robinson, a precocious lad named Blaster, with an adorable dog sidekick that frequently mugs for the camera in eye-rolling cutaways.)

The “special” effects are primitive, the cartoonish characters even more so, as a vengeful Captain Nemo (Star Trek: Discovery‘s painfully earnest Shazad Latif), an enslaved Indian prince, sets out to take down the rapacious East India Mercantile Company that destroyed his family. The Count of Monte Cristo-style revenge plot soon gives way to subterranean exploits involving sea creatures, the hint of a search for Atlantis, and plentiful dangers of the deep.

Not that Nautilus ever goes too deep. There’s a reason, not entirely financial, that Disney+ jettisoned this flimsy but diverting flotsam after it was already produced.

With the British Navy ship Dreadnought forever in pursuit, aboard which a sputtering director of the East India company spouts lines like, “I’ll see you hunted to the ends of the earth,” Nemo rallies his allies to forge ahead in the cutting-edge (for its time) Nautilus — most notably a spunky female scientist, the anything-but-humble Humility Lucas (Georgia Flood), who’s also a runaway bride-to-be. (Her foppish fiancé is such an odious and obvious dolt that I began to yearn for the subtlety of Lost in Space‘s Dr. Smith.)