The film saga has many fans, who’ve previously lauded the series on IMDb.
One person titled their 10/10 review: “One of the all time great seafaring adventures!”
The user added: “It ranks up there with the original Mutiny on the Bounty,The Sea Hawk and Master And Commander as one of the greatest of its kind.”
Another person said in their 10/10 review: “This is one of the most realistic historical dramas out there.
“Everything in Hornblower is played to perfection, from the sets (fantastic, towering ships) to the costumes to the cast. The actors are all so believable in their roles that it’s hard to pull yourself out of that world. I had only flicked onto it by accident on TV, but I couldn’t pull myself away.”
Robert Lindsay starred in the historical films (Image: ITV)
A third described the drama as a “True Swashbuckling Adventure” and added: “A great cast and the sight of the beautiful sailing vessels in full rigging — I’d forgotten how much I love them.”
Someone else commented: “Storytelling at its best!” and elaborated: “The first in the Horatio Hornblower series, this installment is absolutely stunning. After watching this, you will find yourself longing for more. There is enough action, drama, and humor to satisfy just about anyone [sic].”
Yet another person hailed the show as “top notch entertainment” and said: “I viewed this show with some trepidation, as the name Hornblower to me (as with many others) is synonymous with Gregory Peck.
“But this is a different Hornblower and the magic is very much the same – fancy uniforms, good guys and bad guys, lots of sailing ships and lot of blood and thunder. What more can one ask for?”
The film series focuses on the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars(Image: ITV)
Hornblower was a series of historical films led by Hollywood star Ioan Gruffudd and was based on the three of the 10 novels written by C. S. Forester.
The drama followed the fictional title character Horatio Hornblower, a Royal Naval officer during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.
The films ran on ITV from 1998 to 2003, and there were eight in total.
Other cast members included Robert Lindsay, Paul McGann, Paul Copley, Sean Gilder, and Jamie Bamber.
The historical TV films have been praised by audiences (Image: ITV)
There were also some other big names who made appearances, including Denis Lawson, Ian McNeice, Samuel West, Cherie Lunghi, and Greg Wise.
Prior to the ITV films, there were other adaptations of Forester’s novels, with Hollywood star Gregory Peck taking on the character in the 1951 movie Captain Horatio Hornblower.
While David Buck starred in an American TV series as the character in 1963 and Michael Redgrave appeared in a radio adaptation in the 1950s
Certain elements of Jules Verne’s 1870 novel “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” have become a TV series, “Nautilus,” premiering Sunday on AMC, which picked up the show after Disney+, which ordered and completed it, let it drop. Created by James Dormer, it’s not an adaptation but a prequel, or an origin story, as the comic book kids like to say, in which Nemo, not yet captain, sets sail in his submarine for the first time.
Verne’s imaginative fiction has inspired more and less faithful screen adaptations since the days of silent movies. (Georges Méliès 1902 “A Trip to the Moon,” based partially on Verne’s 1865 “From the Earth to the Moon,” is accounted the first science-fiction film.) For a few midcentury years, perhaps inspired by the success of Disney’s own “20,000 Leagues” — a film they continue to exploit in its theme parks — and Mike Todd’s “Around the World in 80 Days,” it was almost a cottage industry: “Journey to the Center of the Earth,” “In Search of the Castaways,” “Five Weeks in a Balloon.” I grew up watching these films rerun on TV; they are corny and fun, as is “Nautilus,” with fancier effects, anticorporate sentiments and people of color.
We have seen Nemo played by James Mason, Michael Caine, Patrick Stewart, Ben Cross and Robert Ryan, but in “The Mysterious Island,” Verne’s sort-of sequel to “Twenty Thousand Leagues,” he identified Nemo as an Indian prince, as he is shown here, played by Shazad Latif, deposed by an imperial power, his wife and child murdered. The character is usually a bit of a madman, and this Nemo — pigheaded, bossy — is not wholly an exception, though he is also a young, smoldering, swashbuckling hero and a man more sinned against than sinning. We meet him as a prisoner of the British East India Mercantile Company, “the most powerful corporation to ever exist, more powerful than any country,” which is building the Nautilus in India with slave labor, in pursuit, says villainous company director Crawley (Damien Garvey), of “prying open and exploiting the Chinese market.” I’m not sure how a submarine is supposed to do that, but, eh, it’s a reason.
Nemo has been collaborating with the submarine’s inventor, Gustave Benoit (Thierry Frémont), who had accepted the corporation’s money under the promise that it would be used for exploration — scientists can be so dense. Nemo, whom the professor credits as the mind behind the ship’s engine, has his own use for the Nautilus and executes a hasty escape with a half-random crew of fellow inmates in a deftly staged sequence that borrows heavily from “Indiana Jones,” an inspirational well to which the series returns throughout.
And we’re off. On the agenda: escaping, revenge and finding buried treasure to finance revenge.
Joining the Nautilus crew are Loti (Céline Menville) and Humility (Georgia Flood).
(Vince Valitutti / Disney+)
When the Nautilus, hardly on its way, cripples the ship they’re traveling on — under the impression that the sub is under attack — the crew is joined, unwillingly, by Humility Lucas (Georgia Flood), a science-minded British socialite with super engineering skills, who is being packed off to Bombay to marry the abominable Lord Pitt (Cameron Cuffe). She’s accompanied by a chaperone/warder, Loti (Céline Menville), a Frenchwoman who has a mean way with a dagger, and cabin boy Blaster (Kayden Price). And a little dog too. Sparks obviously will fly between Nemo and Humility — bad sparks, then good sparks, as in an Astaire and Rogers movie — and there are actual sparks from a bad electrical connection Humility works out how to fix.
Apart from Benoit, Humility and Loti, a big fellow named Jiacomo (Andrew Shaw), who hails from nobody knows where and speaks a language no one understands, and a British stowaway, the crew of the Nautilus are all people of color — South Asian, Asian, Middle Eastern, African or Pacific Islander. Few are really developed as characters, but the actors give them life, and the supporting players carry the comedy, of which there’s a good deal. One episode inverts the tired old scenario in which white explorers are threatened with death by dark-skinned natives; here, the captors are Nordic warrior women. The show is anticolonial and anti-imperialist in a way that “Star Wars” taught audiences to recognize, if not necessarily recognize in the world around them, and anticapitalist in a way that movies have most always been. (The final episode, which has a financial theme, is titled “Too Big to Fail.” It is quite absurd.)
It can be slow at times, which is not inappropriate to a show that takes place largely underwater. But that its structure is essentially episodic keeps “Nautilus” colorful and more interesting than if it were simply stretched on the rack of a long arc across its 10 episodes. It’s a lot like (pre-streaming) “Star Trek,” which is, after all, a naval metaphor, its crew sailing through a hostile environment encountering a variety of monsters and cultures week to week; indeed, there are some similar storylines: the crew infected by a mystery spore, the ship threatened by tiny beasties and giant monsters, encounters with a tinpot dictator and semimythological figures — all the while being pursued by a Klingon Bird of Prey, sorry, a giant metal warship.
The greatest hits of underwater adventuring (some from Verne’s novel) are covered: volcanoes, giant squid, giant eel, engine trouble, running out of air and the ruins of a lost civilization (Is it Atlantis? Benoit hopes so). Less common: a cricket match on the ice. Apart from a pod of whales outside the window (and, later, a whale rescue), not a lot of time is devoted to the wonders of the sea — the special effects budget, which has in other respects been spent lavishly, apparently had no room left for schools of fish. But these submariners have other things on their minds.
The odds of a second season, says my cloudy crystal ball, are limited, so you may have to accommodate a few minor cliffhangers if you decide to watch. I did not at all regret the time I spent here, even though I sometimes had no idea what was going on or found it ridiculous when I did, as there was usually some stimulating activity or bit of scenery or detail of steampunk design to enjoy. I mean, I watched an episode of “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea” recently, a 1960s submarine series, in which guest star John Cassavetes created a superbomb that could destroy three-quarters of the world, and almost nothing in it made any sense at all, including the presence of John Cassavetes. “Nautilus” is actually good.
