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Top 10 Atlantis Movies To See

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Mabinogen
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« on: June 06, 2010, 05:18:51 am »


Top 10 Atlantis Movies To See
Submitted by MalcolmJ on Wed, 06/02/2010 - 15:10



Even Disney jumped onto the Atlantis bandwagon!
Even Disney jumped onto the Atlantis bandwagon!
The legend of Atlantis – a mythical city or continent which it’s said dominated parts of Western Europe and Africa around 9600 BC before sinking into the ocean “in a single day and night of misfortune” – is one of the most popular myths in ancient history. Its name has become a byword for advanced prehistoric lost civilizations.

The Atlantis myth originates in Plato’s dialogues Timaeus and Critias, but has never been substantiated in archaeological evidence. Such sufficiently sketchy details have made it ideal fodder for popular entertainment, not least in the movie industry.

Ever since its first cinema appearance in 1921, in the form of French-Belgian silent film L'Atlantide, Atlantis has regularly featured on the big screen, right up until 2008 with the historical fantasy blockbuster 10,000 BC.

In between we’ve seen the legendary sunken city – in many different incarnations and locations, populated by inhabitants ranging from warring tribes to buxom princesses and fearsome monsters – star in all from big-budget Disney animations to aquatic nature documentaries and low-rent Italian sci-fi action exploitation adventures. With varying results.

Join us as we take a dive into the top ten Atlantis movies of all time – good and bad.
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Mabinogen
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« Reply #1 on: June 06, 2010, 05:20:21 am »

1. Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001)

Disney’s first ever sci-fi animated film, Atlantis: The Lost Empire eschewed the studio’s tried-and-tested formula of musical interludes and cute animals in a bid to make a mature, straight adventure feature in the Jules Verne mould. It didn’t prove an especially successfully move – the film underperformed at the box office (despite a $120 million budget, and voiceovers from well-known actors such as Michael J. Fox and Leonard Nimoy) and received lukewarm reviews.

Unfairly so – the story of a young linguist who in 1914 finds a sacred book which he believes will guide him to Atlantis, and leads a band of archaeologists and mercenaries on a quest to find the sunken city is a pacey, elegantly made picture that does an impressive job of avoiding the clichéd notion of Atlantis as a land of soggy Greek columns.
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« Reply #2 on: June 06, 2010, 05:20:50 am »

2. L'Atlantide (1921)

This French-Belgian silent film directed by Jacques Feyder – the original Atlantis movie – was the first of many adaptations of French author Pierre Benoit’s best-selling novel L'Atlantide, in which two French army officers become lost in the Sahara Desert and stumble across Atlantis. It’s ruled by Queen Antinéa, who has a saucy and peculiar habit of taking captives as lovers, then embalming them in gold when she’s bored of them.

Journey to the Center of the Earth was a 1959 movie based on Jules Verne's novel.
Journey to the Center of the Earth was a 1959 movie based on Jules Verne's novel.

The film was shot entirely on location in the Sahara, at a cost of a whopping two million Francs. That made it the most expensive French film to date, but luckily it proved a massive success at home and abroad, despite lasting for the best part of three hours.
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« Reply #3 on: June 06, 2010, 05:22:02 am »



3. Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959)


On their epic quest to the core of the planet in this 1950s sci-fi adventure (not the 2008 kids remake starring Brendon Fraser), a team of intrepid explorers including James Mason, Pat Boone and a duck come across the sunken remains of Atlantis. It’s perched on the shore of an entire underground sea; perhaps rather fatigued by the volume of remarkable finds they’ve made in the film by this point – two hours in – our heroes don’t take the time to explore it much, but there you go.

Based on the Jules Verne novel of the same name, this was one of the very best Hollywood adventure movies of its day, and therefore probably ranks as the most high-profile Atlantis movie of the lot.
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« Reply #4 on: June 06, 2010, 05:23:12 am »

4. Atlantis: A World Beyond Words (1992)

This worldless arty documentary by French director Luc Besson – a filmmaker who has been fascinated by deep sea exploration his entire career – encourages viewers to forget about the myth of Atlantis and the lost city, and instead view the thriving society down there right now beneath our very noses. Cue great shoals of fish, dolphins, giant turtles and other denizens of the deep, all set to an enchanting symphonic/synthetic score.


Anyone looking for a special-effects heavy underwater adventure yarn will be sorely disappointed, but it’s a great watch nevertheless, and can’t have done any harm for snorkel sales.
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« Reply #5 on: June 06, 2010, 05:24:30 am »

5. SpongeBob’s Atlantis SquarePantis (2007)

If our Atlantis movies top ten was judged solely on the basis of titles, this made-for-TV kid’s movie would be number one by a nautical mile. In SpongeBob’s Atlantis SquarePantis, our chipper animated sea sponge and his aquatic friends embark on a journey to Atlantis, which they’ve heard houses the world’s largest bubble, stopping for numerous songs along the way. Once arrived, they’re given a guided tour by the Lord Royal Highness of Atlantis – voiced, quite bizarrely, by David Bowie. One for youngsters mainly, but plenty for adults to enjoy here too.
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« Reply #6 on: June 06, 2010, 05:25:48 am »



6. Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (1992)

Okay, so this wasn’t a movie but rather a PC-based graphic adventure game spin-off from a film franchise. That said, there was a popular, if never substantiated, rumour flying about at the time that it was a prelude to the plot of Indiana Jones 4 (which of course wound up, 15 years later, being The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull).

Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis was a classic of its genre, which allowed players to guide Indy along three different paths as he quests – on the eve of the outbreak of World War II – to discover and explore the lost continent of Atlantis. All the while his arch foes the Nazis snap at his heels, themselves desperate to unleash the powers of Atlantis on an unsuspecting world. The Nazi plotline was inspired by apparently genuine interest in Atlantis among the Nazis. In 1938, SS chief Heinrich Himmler is said to have organised a German expedition to Tibet to search for Aryan Atlanteans.
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« Reply #7 on: June 06, 2010, 05:26:09 am »

7. Atlantis, The Lost Continent (1961)

This dodgy fantasy adventure epic-on-a-shoestring from 1961 proposes the fanciful theory that the Atlanteans were a civilization “even more advanced scientifically than our own,” who got too big for their boots and received a vengeful whupping from Mother Nature.

Warlords of Atlantis takes the vulgar if imaginative approach of depicting the sunken civilization
Warlords of Atlantis takes the vulgar if imaginative approach of depicting the sunken civilization

A young Greek fisherman rescues an Atlantean princess from a shipwreck, but gets enslaved by her king for his troubles. He’s forced to join other slaves in harvesting mining crystals which absorb the sun’s energy, to power a devastating heat ray weapon. He finally escapes, just before Atlantis is decimated in an explosive finale of flying balsa wood. It’s a bit of a farce on the whole, and was infamous in its day for its brazen use of stock footage from other films, a la Roman adventure Quo Vadis.
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« Reply #8 on: June 06, 2010, 05:26:47 am »



8. Warlords of Atlantis (1978)

Warlords of Atlantis takes the vulgar if imaginative approach of depicting the sunken civilization as a land of not one lost city but seven, all of which are inhabited by weird peoples in the process of battling for supremacy. A team of devious scientists descend to the depths of the sea in a diving bell, and accidentally wind-up in this oceanic war zone where they’re forced to embark on a rescue mission – beset on all sides by foam monsters and vast armies of up to five people – before the whole place destroys itself.

Director Kevin Connor was the man behind such crude but watchable low budget fantasy shockers as The Land That Time Forgot and The People That Time Forgot, and he applies the exact same formula to this film, which could have been subtitled The Movie That Everyone Forgot, it’s so unremarkable.
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« Reply #9 on: June 06, 2010, 05:27:24 am »

9. 10,000 BC (2008)

Just a brief cameo for Atlantis in this historical-fantasy blockbuster by Roland Emmerich – the same master-of-disaster behind 2012 – which was so eagerly and deservingly pilloried by critics, not least for its catalogue of historical and archeological inaccuracies.

Bad guy The Almighty – a living god who is hard at work whipping his army of slaves into building the pyramids in Egypt (more than 7,300 years ahead of schedule, it should be added) – is described as being the last survivor of an extinct master-race that sank into the sea, i.e. the inhabitants of Atlantis. This is hinted at again later in the film by a scene which briefly shows a map depicting a large island in the middle of the Atlantic.
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« Reply #10 on: June 06, 2010, 05:29:10 am »

10. The Raiders of Atlantis (1983)

“One reviewer described the film as ‘not so much suspension of disbelief as total suspension of all brain activity.’ But what would Plato would make of it?”
Controversial Italian director Rugerro ‘Cannibal Holocaust’ Deodato’s contribution to the Atlantis movie canon is this trashy, apocalyptic sci-fi action adventure B-movie, which goes under the Italian title I Predatori di Atlantide (it's also sometimes known as Atlantis Interceptors).

In the process of investigating a wrecked Russian submarine off the coast of Florida, a scientist manages to unwittingly resurrect the lost city of Atlantis, and its evil inhabitants, who resemble some kind of Mad Max-style punk rock biker gang in fetish gear. They proceed to start killing everyone, without any clear motive. It’s up to two grizzled Vietnam vets, wielding enough hardware to make the A-Team look like conscientious objectors, to shoot, smash, slash, crash, kick ass and high-five their way to saving the day.

It’s so bad it was described by one science fiction author – David Wingrove, in the Science Fiction Film Source Book – as “not so much suspension of disbelief as total suspension of all brain activity.” We’d love to know what Plato would make of it.
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« Reply #11 on: June 06, 2010, 05:30:07 am »

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAjP_u1S0Dc&feature=player_embedded

http://heritage-key.com/blogs/malcolmj/top-10-atlantis-movies-see
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