Review of Atlantis: The Lost Continent

I thought this film would be a bit of a turkey but it turned out to be very entertaining. There are echoes of the same director's The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds in it. It combines sci-fi with Greek mythology very well. Although it is very much a fantasy film the pre-title sequence where the narrator talks about the things in the Old World and the New whose similarity which must be more than coincidental is quite thought provoking and you wonder what the real reason was for there being cave paintings of elephants in America and paintings of witches being similar on both sides of the Atlantic. It was made in the early sixties and it seems also to be making a statement about nuclear power with one crystal being used for lighting and heat and another being used for destruction. That scene seems to be a veiled warning about controlling our technology and not letting it run away. The rulers of Atlantis seem also to be a metaphor for the Nazis with their ideas of racial superiority and their desire to conquer the world together with their use of slave labour. A good film for all the family.