Ryan’s Movie Corner
Ryan’s Movie Corner March 2023
By Ryan Vickers
It’s Academy Awards (Oscar) season, so it’s time to dive right in (ha!) to this month’s selections full of award winners.
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, science-fiction, 1954.
Let’s go back almost eighty years to a Jules Verne inspired classic. Nemo, master of the Nautilus, takes the audience along for the ride (ok, the “swim”) along with the characters of Professor Aronax, his assistant Conseil and master harpooner Ned Land. Kirk Douglas stars Ned in this classic which has, it would appear, stood the test of time.
With a total cost of $9 million USD, it certainly was a whopper (I’m on a roll) of a production budget for its time. However, with that being said, it was a double Academy Award winner. The movie won Best Art Direction – Colour (remember, this was 1954, and many movies and television shows were still screening in black and white), winning Best Special Effects. In addition, the film received a nomination for Best Film Editing.
It continues to have a presence today – in August of 2021, Disney Plus announced a prequel named Nautilus that was scheduled to film in 2022.
The film is available on Amazon Prime and Disney Plus in numerous territories – however, check local listings in your area to see if you can watch it!
The Oscars screen on a Sunday evening in Los Angeles, California, USA, while on the same weekend, there is another awards presentation called the “Razzies.” The Razzies give out awards in categories that are non-traditional ones, such as “Worst Screen Combo” and “Worst Remake, Rip-Off or Sequel.” However, good people do end up in Razzie films… Tom Hanks, for example, is a double Razzie winner in 2023 for his involvement in “Elvis” and “Disney’s Pinocchio.” Even Sandra Bullock pulled a rare double by winning a Razzie and an Oscar on the same weekend.
Bearing that in mind, I went onto some internet scuba message forums to source what might just be the worst scuba movie of all time (remember, not every scuba film can be a winner).
Air, “science-fiction,” 2014.
(Side note, as I type this, the song “No Air” by Jordyn Sparks has popped on my satellite radio feed. Make of this what you will.)
A 3.9 out of 10 on the Internet Movie Database doesn’t sound that bad, does it?
Maybe it sounds worse when you realize that less than 100 people not only watched the movie but took the time to write about it. I guess that’s 98 when you count me! As a comparison, the above film is at 7.2/10 with over 35,000 reviews.
Plot summary for this stinker: a scuba diver finds land with no breathable air and must return to her start point before her tank runs out of air.
I loved this exchange from www.scubaboard.com:
User One: “After five minutes of watching, the viewer hopes the main character will just die, so the movie will end.”
User two: “Why did you watch more than five minutes? Did you think it would get better?”
To paraphrase a different saying: “Caveat vigil cinematographicus” – “Let the film watcher beware.”
Want to see how it is for yourself? Try searching on Tubi TV and Amazon Prime.
That’s it for this month – happy award season!
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