Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island

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.