Mysterious Island

The island is mysterious. I'll give the movie credit for that, at least. And the mysteriousness of the island does manage to carry this for a while. The basic problem that I had with this, though, was that after a while I simply found myself not caring. The characters weren't at all sympathetic. None of them were sufficiently developed to really make me care about their fate, which is a big problem in a movie like this, since most of the story revolves around what's happening to the castaways.

The movie is obviously based on the Jules Verne story of the same name in which a group of Union soldiers steal a giant Confederate balloon in order to escape from Richmond near the end of the Civil War and get carried by the winds to the island. Obviously it's based very loosely on that story. I have only vague memories of the Verne story, but what I recall tells me that while the very basic outline is here, much of the original story is either left out or changed in this. And obviously, Verne having written the story in 1875, the addition of the Bermuda Triangle plot, and the crash of the airplane aren't from the Verne story at all, the former simply lending a paranormal feel to this, the latter being little more than an excuse to introduce two attractive young women to the group of castaways. The ending left me a bit dry and it left everything up in the air, whereas the Verne story had a much more definite ending.

For a while this is fine. It just falters mainly on the sense of indifference I had to the characters. If you don't care about the characters, you really don't care about the story. (4/10)