Nautilus

Nautilus (1998) Well, you have your submarine movies, your end of the world movies, your time travel movies, and your kung-fu movies. With Nautilus, you get ‘em all in one low budget package. You don’t have to search the video racks for each genre, Nautilus has it all, a real time saver. It seems that while drilling into the earth’s core to tap a new source of energy, a series of violent earthquakes and explosions are set off, destroying the ecology and in a hundred years or so in the future, mankind is battling extinction. Now if things are that bad I don’t know how they came up with this super duper time traveling submarine but let’s not look into the plot assumptions too closely.

The Nautilus is sent back to stop the final drilling from tapping the core. Here is another little problem, since they only have a little time to stop the project, why didn’t they go back a little farther in time and give themselves a little more time to stop it so they would have a little more time to get there in time. Is this making sense? This is usually a problem with time travel movies.

Mix in an evil profit hungry industrialist (now there’s a new concept in movies), a far too single-minded and violent group of tree huggers, a kung-fu learned security chief hired by the industrialist to protect the oil rig they are located on, a navy team trying to neutralize the Nautilus, and you have several groups of people working at cross purposes. And that is the best part of the movie; at times you are not exactly sure who you should be rooting for to win!

The US Navy takes its lumps and everything works out in the end for most (but not all) of the cast. This is not a good movie but there are many far worse at the video store and how many of your friends can say they’ve seen the best time traveling submarine – kung-fu – end of the world movie ever made. The movie is rated R for: lots of killing, destructive and murderous ecologists, dumb scientists, excessive plastique bombs, not enough time, loss of a US submarine and a couple of fighter jets, cheesy sets and for the usual paradoxes that crop up in all time travel movies.