NAKED CITY: TWENTY ONE MILLION DOLLARS UNDER THE RADAR!

Here at the Naked City we have never been too excited when Hollywood announces it’s rehashing a movie classic from a bygone era. Most remakes fall way short of the original and whilst the production is often slicker thanks to new technologies, the end result is often mediocre.

Last week the Federal Government announced it was coughing up a $21 million subsidy for a new version of Disney’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea to be filmed here in Australia, the majority at Fox Studios in Sydney. The Government claims that this is money well spent because it creates jobs for Australian filmmakers and generates revenue whilst the production is in Sydney – no doubt with the big Hollywood stars dining out at our finest restaurants.

Not everybody supports the film subsidy policy and one Labour backbencher, Ed Husic, suggested the money would be better spent on buying a much-needed MRI machine for a hospital in his Western Sydney electorate. The fact that Disney, one of the wealthiest film studios in the world today, is getting such a large handout from the Government does tend to stick in  the craw, regardless of the financial rationale.

No doubt the new Disney production will be packed with more CGI than you can poke a terabyte at and have the big Hollywood names queuing to play the prize role of Captain Nemo (please not Bruce Willis!). The irony of the movie’s massive squid-like monster as a metaphor for Hollywood strangling and sucking the blood out of our own Australian film industry will not be lost on many of our local filmmakers.

Whilst it’s most unlikely, we would at least expect some poetic licence and an injection of Australiana into a film that will be shot essentially in Sydney. After all the original theme of Jules Verne’s novel was supposedly inspired by the epic wanderings of Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey. Whilst Disney’s reboot is bound to be more visual than visceral we would be hoping for some kind of subtext, given the complexity of Verne’s original Captain Nemo character.

The original Nemo was a dedicated marine biologist and conservationist and would it not be appropriate for the Nautilus to sink a couple of Japanese whalers during its meanderings  through the Antarctic. In the original 1954 Disney movie, starring James Mason and Kirk Douglas, Nemo kept a pet sea lion called Esmeralda. For the Australian production this could easily translate to Darlene the Dugong with other Australian fauna (a numbat, a wombat and a koala) appearing sporadically albeit gratuitously throughout the Nautilus.

If you are filming in Sydney we would love to see some of this city and surely the script could accommodate some added scenes, like the Nautilus dry docking at Cockatoo Island,   accidentally beaching at a nude beach and inadvertently sinking a ferry load of bucks nighters on Sydney Harbour.

In the meantime why hang out for the multi million dollar remake when  the original 1954 version, shot in vibrant Technicolour and Cinemascope and featuring some brilliant old style special effects (not to mention the brilliant Peter Lorre) awaits your rediscovery – no 3D glasses required.