raphael de valentin

from Screenhub This swashbuckling revision of Jules Verne’s 1870 submarine classic was almost sunk before it could launch. Commissioned for Disney+ in 2021, it was lavishly filmed – for $300 million – on the Gold Coast in 2022, with an 80% local cast and crew. But it was spiked in 2023 – a casualty of Bob Iger’s ‘aggressive cost reductions’ when he regained control of Big Mouse. Happily, Stan has thrown Nautilus a lifeline. So you can now watch a rag-tag bunch of colonial misfits fight giant squids and sea monsters in South-East Asia, travel to the frozen Arctic in search of sunken Viking treasure, and penetrate England’s dark imperial heart. Are you up for a mashup of Pirates of the Caribbean and Black Sails with Star Wars and Star Trek? Did you enjoy the eco-warrior whales in Avatar: The Way of Water? Would you like an exotic adventure quest without Dwayne Johnson, or wish Indiana Jones had dialled down the racism and sexism? But do you still enjoy Romancing the Stone screwball bickering? If so, I’ve got 10 episodes of great news for you. Nautilus: anti-colonial adventure Written and executive produced by former diplomat James Dormer, Nautilus takes its place alongside Taboo and Frontier in depicting the racist plunder of 19th-century private trading companies such as the British East India Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company as unambiguously evil. While Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea introduced readers to the heroic subaltern submariner Captain Nemo (Shazad Latif), this version draws more substantially on its sequel The Mysterious Island, which reveals Nemo as Prince Dakkar, the English-educated son of a rajah who was unjustly imprisoned after the EIMC slaughtered his family and stole his country. And while Verne’s Nemo – Latin for ‘no one’ – secretly designed and built the submersible ship Nautilus himself to escape terrestrial oppression and study the marine world, here it’s the EIMC’s plunder weapon, audaciously stolen from a work camp in Kalpani, India by the convicts who built it. EIMC Director Crawley (Damien Garvey, relishing the pantomime villainy, but never quite able to shake his Australian accent) announces that the Nautilus will launch imminently, against the protests of its designer, French scientist Gustave Benoit (Thierry Frémont). This forces the prisoner who calls himself Nemo to immediately activate his hijack plan. Some of his convict co-conspirators are already aboard, while others are caught up in the fray. The Nautilus’s new crew includes African man Boniface (Pacharo Mzembe), Māori man Kai (Tyrone Ngatai), Chinese farmer Suyin (Ling Cooper Tang), keen-eared Turan (Arlo Green), communist intellectual Jagadish (Chum Ehelepola) and his young follower Ranbir (Ashan Kumar), and hulking, bearded Jiacomo (Andrew Shaw), who speaks a language no one understands. Nautilus: steampunk delight When Verne dreamed up the Nautilus, the all-electric ship was completely futuristic, astoundingly beyond the capabilities of submarines at the time. Now, however, its 19th-century technology and Arts and Crafts fabrication reads as steampunk – and the show’s budget pays off in the beautiful exterior and interior