Outside a Confederate prison camp in Virginia, the Civil War rages, night approaches, a storm brews, and five souls with nothing in common but the will to survive prepare an escape. The diverse group: Union Captain Cyrus Smith (Golden Globe winner Kyle MacLachlan, Twin Peaks), the African-American slave, Neb (Omar Gooding, Hangin’ with Mr. Cooper), widowed nurse Jane Spillet (Gabrielle Anwar, Scent of a Woman), her teenage daughter Helen (Danielle Calvert, Oscar Charlie), and two desperate Confederate soldiers Pencroff (Jason Durr, Winter Solstice) and LeMay. Carried afar in a scouting balloon by a thundering gale, they alight on a seemingly peaceful Pacific island. But when LeMay is dispatched by the serrated forelegs of an eight-foot-tall praying mantis, the remaining survivors fear they’ve stumbled upon a tropical hell where the earth’s creatures are as impossibly gigantic as are their insatiable appetites. Vulnerable, starving, and fearing for their lives, they are ushered to safety by an eccentric stranger who inhabits the mysterious island for his own strange ends.
He is Captain Nemo (Emmy and Golden Globe nominee Patrick Stewart, The Lion in Winter), madman, genius, and a legend in the annals of war, long thought dead. Now in his impenetrable compound—a miracle of human technology—he and his manservant Joseph (Roy Marsden, King Solomon’s Mines) work toward an inconceivable goal: to build an incalculably destructive bomb, not to instigate war, but to end it forever. He wants Cyrus—a gifted engineer—to help him. Together they can embark into explosive infamy on his famed submarine, Nautilus. When Cyrus refuses, Nemo casts his ill-fated guests back into danger, where they are certain to meet their doom. If not by the carnivorous beasts, then by Bob Harvey and his band of bloodthirsty pirates who have come to the island to unearth a fabled treasure. As the castaways fight the odds against creatures both human and inhuman, against the murderous greed of men, and against the backdrop of a smoldering volcano that threatens with every rumble, Captain Nemo may prove to be their only salvation.