A few men crash land on an oddball island.
The trick is to forget all that you know about past versions of Mysterious Island and go into this with an open mind. It can be a struggle as I only know the colourful 1961 motion picture, with that mighty Bernard Herrmann music playing over it, so getting that out of my mind was hard. But anyway, the review...
This is not too bad at all, if you have no problem with watching men walk, walk and run, run around an island. We get a lot of that. But famed 60s science fiction TV producer - Irwin Allen - rooted a lot of his work (Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, The Time Tunnel, Land Of The Giants, etc) on serials and you can just picture Allen watching Mysterious Island (1951) and taking notes.
Hidden caves with aliens inside, an erupting volcano, almost zero characterisation, grim faced determination, over-the-top alien costumes, pinching music cues from other studio productions (in this case Columbia's Batman and Robin), etc. It is all here and a lot turned up in Irwin Allen TV as well.
If you have no interest in the Allen connection, I would still tune in anyway, but don't even think about watching the whole four or five hours in one viewing. After one hour I needed a 24 hour rest from it. I would suggest one hour a night.
The trick is to forget all that you know about past versions of Mysterious Island and go into this with an open mind. It can be a struggle as I only know the colourful 1961 motion picture, with that mighty Bernard Herrmann music playing over it, so getting that out of my mind was hard. But anyway, the review...
This is not too bad at all, if you have no problem with watching men walk, walk and run, run around an island. We get a lot of that. But famed 60s science fiction TV producer - Irwin Allen - rooted a lot of his work (Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, The Time Tunnel, Land Of The Giants, etc) on serials and you can just picture Allen watching Mysterious Island (1951) and taking notes.
Hidden caves with aliens inside, an erupting volcano, almost zero characterisation, grim faced determination, over-the-top alien costumes, pinching music cues from other studio productions (in this case Columbia's Batman and Robin), etc. It is all here and a lot turned up in Irwin Allen TV as well.
If you have no interest in the Allen connection, I would still tune in anyway, but don't even think about watching the whole four or five hours in one viewing. After one hour I needed a 24 hour rest from it. I would suggest one hour a night.