User Reviews

These comments might be considered as a spoiler for those of you who might not know the behind the scenes information on this film so you may want to beware and not read any further.

Recycled actors, costumes, sets, miniatures and stock footage from Irwin Allen's TV show Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea make up some of "City Beneath the Sea." Case in point, stock footage of the Flying Sub was used extensively as well as repainted interiors of the subs interior were used. The title was used in a first year voyage episode(2nd episode).

You have to admire Irwin Allen though because he never threw anything away he just found ways to reuse things in order to save money.

He did have some heavy weights appear in the film such as Robert Wagner and Richard Basehart (Voyage's Admiral Nelson) Joesph Cotton as well as past cast members of his show "Time Tunnel".

This is a must see for Irwin Allen fans and I must say that I am one. Allen was one of the greatest producers of all time.

It is my understanding that it was also a pilot for a possible weekly series that did not sell.

If you can over look all the recycling and cut corners you may enjoy this film which takes place around the year 2050.

I did not particularly like the film but I must say that it was entertaining in some ways.

Jamey

City Beneath the Sea is set in the brave new futuristic world of the 21st Century (it was made in the 20th...) where a city underneath the sea has been built, it is known as Pacifica. Admiral Michael Matthews (Stuart Whitman) has been recalled to take charge of Pacifica after a 6 month hiatus away because everyone blamed him for the death of a much loved & respected scientist Bill Holmes (even though listed in the credits as played by Larry Pennell the character of Bill Holmes is dead from the start & never seen on screen in present time, he is only seen briefly on a video monitor), however the president wants Matthews there as the entire gold content of fort knox is going to stored in Pacifica as well as the entire world supply of H1-28 which is the most powerful power source ever created unfortunately it's also highly explosive. To add to Matthews worries it turns out that a meteorite or Planetoid is headed for a collision with Earth & will hit at Pacifica's location in seven hours...

This made-for-TV remake of the made-for-TV City Beneath the Sea (1969) was produced & directed by infamous 60's sci-fi filmmaker Irwin Allen & is a silly piece of sci-fi nonsense that is an OK time waster. The script by John Meredyth Lucas moves along at a fair pace & is passable light hearted Saturday afternoon entertainment if your in the right frame of mind, it's a pleasant enough way to spend 90 odd minutes but you'll have completely forgotten about it by the time the day finishes. The character's are pretty clichéd, the heroic hero dude, the bad guy & a blonde woman are all one dimensional stereotypes. The whole double cross & plan to steal the gold & H1-28 is poorly handled without any suspense or tension, the bad guys are revealed straight away so there's no mystery element & a potentially decent twist ending is wasted & they barely do anything anyway. Then there's the meteorite thing, was Matthews the only person on the entire planet who thought about firing nuclear weapons into it to change it's course? Surely the president & his scientific advisor's would have come up with the same conclusion or is it just that Matthews is the cleverest person on Earth? Some of the logic just isn't very good & rather clunky, just about worth a watch if you don't expect too much.

This is definitely an Irwin Allen film with loads of bright garish sets & hideously dated looking computer banks the size of a small shed complete with random flashing lights & computer screens that feature plenty of bad super imposition. The city of Pacifica is obviously a scale model & a not very good one, the main computer control room set was apparently re-dressed & used in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972). What was it with Allen & all those flashing random lights anyway? They were a trademark of the films he made & I don't see their attraction to be honest. I recognised the yellow model ship thing from Allen's TV series Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1964 - 1968). Also, why are the fish & marine life so big? Huge fish that swim past the windows & the like? Odd.

Technically the film is alright, some of the sets & 'futuristic' equipment are horribly dated these days & wouldn't even convince a 5 year old. Still that's where part of it's charm & fun comes from I suppose. The acting isn't the best even though there's some good character actor's here, Richard Basehart teams up with Allen again to play the president, Sugar Ray Robinson makes an appearance somewhere along with Whit Bissell, Joseph Cotten & Burr DeBenning all of whom are sadly no longer with us.

City Beneath the Sea is an OK sci-fi adventure flick that is relatively undemanding fun in a cheesy & dated sort of way, good enough but not great. Not to be confused with the short lived British TV series City Beneath the Sea (1962) or the underwater adventure film City Beneath the Sea (1953) about two divers looking for sunken gold.

A genuinely boring TV science fiction Adventure about an underwater city in danger of being blown up that could also destroy the world, this is Irwin Allen at his weakest. It's easy to see why some of his workout ended up on the small screen as opposed to the big screen, and coming the year before "The Poseidon Adventure", this is a complete disappointment. Stuart Whitman is a naval Admiral who discovers that there is a plot to destroy the underwater city of Pacifica and is joined by former rival Robert Colbert who once replace him in a officers role that has changed their friendship to hatred.

Rosemary Forsyth and Robert Wagner also appear, but the fault of the film lies in the technical focus of the script which makes it tedious and boring. A few exciting sequences and decent special effects doesn't save this from becoming monotonous. This is something that may have been a decent hour long TV special as part of a science fiction anthology show, but as a full length movie, it looks cheap and nowhere ready for prime time.

Despite reading a couple of poor reviews about City Beneath the Sea, I quite enjoyed this. It was a pilot for a TV series that was never made.

It is about Pacifica and the lives of its residents. It has its own Fort Knox where gold is kept but there are plans to steal this. Worse still, there is an asteroid on a collision course with the Earth and is due to strike near Pacifica, so an evacuation is ordered immediately. Luckliy, a way is devised to destroy this body, some missiles are sent up and it changes course and both Pacifica and the Earth are saved.

City Beneath the Sea is directed by Irwin Allen (Lost In Space, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, The Towering Inferno). As well as one of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea's stars, Richard Basehart, the Flying Sub from that series also appears in this.

Other cast members include Stuart Whitman, Robert Wagner (Titanic), Joesph Cotten (The Third Man), Rosemary Forsyth, Whit Bissell (I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, Creature From the Black Lagoon), Robert Colbert, James Darren and boxer Sugar Ray Robinson.

Though not brilliant, City Beneath the Sea is worth viewing, especially if you are a fan of Irwin Allen like myself.

Rating: 3 stars out of 5.

There are many ways to view this film which had pilot movie written all over it. Other reviews have hit them, so I won't delve too deeply. However, if you are a fan of Irwin Allen's TV shows or his movies, this is for you.

It's really combination of 60's sci-fi with 70's Disaster Films, which is appropriate given Allen's career path at this point. It very much has a "throw in everything but the kitchen sink" feel. Any of the subplots probably could have served as a serviceable main plot, but cramming them all in makes it laughable, but in an enjoyable way.

You have: The return of a controversial commander and the tensions that brings. A gold heist (by the commander's brother, no less) A dangerously unstable radioactive element. A meteor about to hit them.

When you consider two of those plots were major hit films for Bruce Willis, you can see how the plots kind of piled up. I really wanted Stuart Whitman to have an "Oh what a week I'm having" moment.

Mostly the movie is fun and can't be judged to harshly because it never really attempts to be more than it is.

When I first saw this movie, it was making its rounds through the armed forces theaters overseas. To me, it not only showed a nice future, of beautiful people to what it would mean to be adult, but also a connection to recent childhood fantasies.

I remember as a child that when a show was canceled or we moved away and could no longer see it, we thirst for any possibility of seeing that missed show again. I would watch other shows with the same actors, hoping to see something of the character again. City Beneath the Sea, however, went a step further in giving the devices from what was missed before, such as with the Flying Sub or the Aquafoil. The Flying Sub, further, was not just something we saw on TV but thanks to the Aurora Model Company, it was something that we had actually "owned".

So this movie came along while we were still children and we fell in love with it then and forever.

Would it stand up to time if seen for the first time now or seen with the eyes of an adult? No, probably not. Different era, different level of basic knowledge. It is like trying to read Doc Savage; if one approaches it only from the world they know now, it is very tedious.

See it with the eyes of a child who might see it as they might see their future.

This movie might be dubbed the king of salad bowl movies, with so many subplots and genres mixed... 1 a James Bond subplot about some Swiss crime agency planning to steal huge amounts of gold. 2 a Yosei Gorasu rip-off subplot about a planetoid of exceptional mass colliding with earth, diverted using nuclear missiles (cfr Meteor with Sean Connery ). 3 a hero-in-distress subplot about an admiral falsely accused of murder 4 a mutant able to breathe under water (later copied in "the man from Atlantis" with Patrick Duffy ) 5 a secret underwater nuclear warhead base. 6 the underwater experimental city in which research is held to produce plancton-based foods subplot (cfr Soylent Green & H&B cartoon Sealab 2020 in 1977 ). 7 costumes, trying to imagine new fashion, are reminiscent of UK UFO. 8 all women look like beauty contestants wearing minidresses & high-heels (cfr Star Trek, UFO etc ). 9 the friend-turned-traitor conspiracy subplot.

This said, it's a short & enjoyable, unpretentious movie. SFX look very dated ( the piles of gold bullions are clearly carton boxes ) but retain that 1960-ish charm, extended to the whole movie, typical of UFO & other productions using perhaps too many garage sale toys and miniatures. Acting is negligible, with iconic characters playing their part: the scheming traitor; the coward hireling of the traitor; the belle who changes her mind; the hero... Forsyth's and Miranda's pretty legs and face are the best part of acting i guess. However, it is an easy movie for some relaxing time. You are not supposed to find 1984 (1954, with Peter Cushing ) acting or Matrix SFX in a 1960ish movie with toys & miniatures...are you? To watch more than once.