Reviewing Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea isn't easy -- it isn't Forbidden Planet, with lots of profound ideas scattered around its script, or even The Fly, with a story of human frailty at its core; nor is it even Journey to the Center of the Earth, with its outsized special effects, score, and casting; rather, it represents the fun side of science fiction cinema. Producer/director Irwin Allen was a popular culture maven -- if he saw the potential to recycle an idea into something new and profitable, and pitch it in a new or different way, he did it. Thus, his production of The Big Circus was a B-movie (or "nervous A"-movie) recycling of The Greatest Show on Earth, right down to having Peter Lorre (as opposed to James Stewart) in clown makeup; and Five Weeks in a Balloon was his more modest adaptation of a Jules Verne tale, done after Around the World in 80 Days. And Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea was Allen's attempt to retell Disney's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea in modern terms, even getting Peter Lorre into the new movie; nuclear submarines were still a source of wonder in 1961, and the Van Allen radiation belt surrounding Earth was still a new discovery, thus giving the movie a topical edge that the Disney film had lacked. Allen's direction is a little flaccid by today's standards, but the movie is great fun and paced perfectly, packing in about two hours' worth of excitement into just over 100 minutes of screen time, all of it looking sparklingly new and topical in its settings at that time. The finished film emphasized the things that Allen cared about most: adventure, excitement, lots of undersea shots (Allen had a special fascination with undersea adventures, having made the Oscar-winning documentary The Sea Around Us), and some colorful star performances. The special effects by L.B. Abbott are the real "star" of the movie, but Walter Pidgeon brings a certain eccentric dignity to the proceedings as the possibly "mad" Admiral Harriman Nelson (a pop-culture re-imagining of real-life nuclear navy gadfly Admiral Hyman Rickover), and the rest of the cast, down to the bit players, brings a lot of color to the film. The television series subsequently spawned by this movie used most of the models and special effects designs as a jumping-off point, and became what was the longest-running non-anthology network science fiction series in history, lasting four seasons.
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