A good idea for a TV show is a precious thing and, on paper, Nautilus is a great idea. It’s a prequel to Jules Verne’s 1870 novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, providing a fuller backstory for Captain Nemo, the mercurial captain of the futuristic submarine Nautilus, and following the majestic craft on its first adventures.
As per Verne’s follow-up novel The Mysterious Island, Nemo here is Indian and played by Shazad Latif – who has a knack for filling small roles with lasting cult appeal (including IT genius Tariq Masood in Spooks and Clem Fandango (“Yes I can hear you, Clem Fandango!”) in Toast of London. Now he’s a dominant leading man, a naval engineering wizard who, in 1857, is working as an indentured labourer for the rapacious East India Company in Bombay. To prevent the ship he has been forced to build being used for fresh colonial evil, and to win his freedom, he steals the Nautilus and sets off on an indefinite maritime escapade, helped by a crew of fellow revolutionaries, random hangers-on and a handful of hostages.
Most notable among the captives is the sensationally monikered Humility Lucas (Georgia Flood), a posh Englishwoman whose personal connection to the East India Company ensures that the Nautilus will be pursued by moustache-twirling Britons until Nemo is brought to justice. As well as being a headstrong type who keeps trying to escape and does not pay the submarine’s skipper any respect – although perhaps she and Nemo will warm to each other eventually – she’s also a clever stick, the daughter of an engineer who wants to emulate her beloved father. She hasn’t been on board the Nautilus for five minutes before she’s shouting: “I need grease and a pipe clamp!” and fixing a leak using a cloth strip torn from her petticoats.
We’re all set for a Twenty Thousand Leagues reboot – the Nautilus has encounters with giant squid and treacherous frozen waters that echo the book – boosted by a female foil and a clear antagonist in the form of “the Company”, which gives the drama an explicit political bent. Out-of-control capitalism is blighting the planet and condemning millions to miserable servitude – as they bob uncertainly on, the characters debate the extent to which the drastic action favoured by Nemo is the optimal solution, but it’s suggested that resistance is long overdue. And, if the salty class war starts to drag, there’s always a whale to wonder at.
It should be ace, but the long and arduous journey Nautilus has taken to reach the screen suggests it might not be. The show has now been picked up by Prime Video, more than a year after it was made for Disney+, who declined to distribute it. Although a scaling back of budgets was cited, if Disney had wanted Nautilus, they surely could have found the remaining cash. We have to presume they saw it and balked.
Sadly, you can see why. Latif and Flood are fine, albeit in roles where the script keeps leaving them one or two killer moments short in every episode. Beyond them, the trouble starts. The submarine’s crew and passengers again sound good in theory: there’s a bloviating coward, a morose wisecracker, a wily trickster who emerges victorious in every scenario, a linguistically enigmatic strongman and a dog. But the outstanding supporting performance is given by the dog.
A show like this can forgive one or two actors who are wooden, but that virus runs through nearly everyone here. Because it already feels like Our Flag Means Death with fewer jokes, it loses whatever comic relief it’s meant to have, because every light moment drops with a heavy clang. In their defence, the cast are regularly landed with difficult tasks: Nautilus loves the old cliche of cutting to members of the ensemble after an improbable escape from peril, and asking them to laugh with relief while gazing into the middle distance. There is no middle distance on a submarine, but in a show like this, that doesn’t stop anyone.
Meanwhile, with Nautilus not seeming confident about how old its target audience is, the action scenes all come out half baked. Underwater creatures are convincing enough, without provoking much awe; gun battles and knife fights have high casualty counts, without any proper air of threat. The theme of sticking it to the corporate oppressor also has the handbrake applied to it, mainly in the form of Nemo’s annoying deputy, Benoit (Thierry Frémont), who moans whenever Nemo contemplates violent vengeance against a Company Man, even after one of them has stabbed Benoit in the guts. Nautilus could have been a monster; in the end, it barely causes a ripple.
• Nautilus is on Prime Video now.
