Latitude Zero
Directed by Ishirō HondaA journalist is saved by a giant submarine captained by a 200-year-old man who takes him to an underwater paradise city where no one ages. That's when monsters and mutants sent by the captain's rival, a 200-year-old scientist, attack.
Latitude Zero Ratings & Reviews
- RichardAugust 3, 2025Discovered this one and was drawn in by the premise, stayed for the submarine and left with a mix of admiration and amused bewilderment. A journalist is rescued from a deep sea disaster by a massive submarine captained by Craig McKenzie, a 200-year-old man who rules over an underwater utopia where aging is optional and fashion is eternal. But paradise doesn’t last. Enter Dr. Malic, McKenzie’s nemesis and a mad scientist with a flair for mutant mayhem. Cue giant rats, flying lions and hybrid horrors that look like they escaped from a Toho creature lab on a sugar rush. The cast is international and oddly charming: Joseph Cotten and Cesar Romero bring Hollywood gravitas to a Japanese production that’s equal parts earnest and bonkers. The sets are colorful, the premise is pulpy and the tone? Somewhere between philosophical sci-fi and rubber-suit chaos. I liked the ambition, the retro flair and the sheer “why not?” energy. It’s the kind of movie that may feel campy, chaotic and weirdly profound, with submarines, immortality and a villain who really should’ve won a fashion award.
- Gwyneth LlewelynJanuary 14, 2026I was mostly intrigued because it features Patricia Medina, has a Japanese director and script, and I was searching for things related to the Null Island (which doesn't exist — it's jargon for the (0º,0º) point on Earth, where the Prime Meridian and the Equator intersect). After watching it, well... I believe I'm spoiled by contemporary CGI. I can see the infinite amount of time spent in doing all those models and special effects, and then assuring that the green-screening was working properly (often it's good enough that you don't notice it — kudos to the SFX team!). But, alas, this is (not yet) the level of special effects you get, just eight years later, with Star Wars (and a decade later with Alien, Blade Runner, even Tron...) — it's still just "smoke and mirrors", so to speak, doing all the tricks the old and hard way, with models and special camera shots, double exposure on the film, and so forth. So, it takes some time until the "suspension of disbelief" settles in and you can enjoy the story as it unfolds. Unfortunately, the cast was clearly not cherry-picked (although I read on Wikipedia that this wasn't the case!) — most are terrible actors, and only Patricia does a somewhat convincing character (which doesn't require a lot of effort, frankly). Actor direction is clearly below the standards of the time as well — this is no Apocalypse Now — but often some scenes feel rushed, undermanaged, or simply badly scripted. And here is where I got baffled. You see, I'm strongly prejudiced in favour of manga/anime, at least those produced by the best Japanese mangakas and directors: they have awesome scripts. For some strange reason, they seem to have a natural talent for developing incredible stories, and, in a market where thousands compete with very similar concepts, they must make a serious effort to stand out from the crowd — and that means having a fantastic narrative and a dense level of intrigue and side-plots, all of which resolve at the end in the least expected way. The *style* of the scriptwriter might naturally be different, and that means a large variety of completely different types of stories, but all of them are fantastic. I was expecting that a Japanese-produced, Japanese-written, and Japanese-directed movie was at the same level of quality — nevermind the Hollywood actors and/or the outdated special effects. These are unimportant and secondary; if the story is good and the characters convincing you really don't care much more about the rest. In manga or anime, it's quite frequent that I dislike some of the artists that illustrate a story. It's normal — we all have our personal preferences. Some series, for instance, tend to use different mangakas (or animation creators), each having their own flavour, and their own idea on how the characters and the environment are depicted. Some I like; some I don't; and I'm sure that the reverse is also true. What keeps us all hooked on the same series (or feature movie) is how compelling the narrative are and how well the characters are played. "Latitude Zero", unfortunately and to my disappointment, has none of that. The plot is perhaps best described as a mix of Jules Verne's "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas"/"The Mysterious Island" with H. G. Wells' "The Island of Doctor Moreau" — which, in itself, is not bad: the same theme(s) can be reused over and over again by different authors/movie directors and brought out in a new light. The advantage is bringing something familiar: a submarine that has a bridge that looks much more like the Enterprise of Star Trek fame would certainly appear convincing as a futurist concept, at a time when Star Trek was already a huge success. But everybody would have been familiar with Nemo's Nautilus and expect all sort of quasi-magical technical improvements. The laser, for instance, which was discovered ca. 1965 and therefore still "new" to the public at large, is one of the weapons of choice in this movie, and it totally makes sense when considering that lasers are indeed used as one of the ways to cut neatly through steel in factories. The discovery of the properties of lasers also allowed a further invention: holograms. This is used in the movie as well — not mentioned by name, unlike lasers — and, although the precise method of producing such holograms is never explained (and we certainly don't have the technology to do what is shown in the movie, not even today), it's reasonable to expect that a society having advanced power sources (because the ultra-powerful lasers shown in the movie require massive power to work as they are shown, and the source of that power is never explained, especially because the laser-firing devices seem to be able to shoot their beams for as long as they wish, even on portable units; they have "unlimited" ammo, so to speak. Kudos, however, to the writers that remembered that producing such strong beams would generate a LOT of heat, and, therefore, shooting short, targetted bursts and not continous ones would allow the heat to dissipate between shots — all accurate!) and laser technology could indeed produce the kind of holograms as shown in the movie. It's not much different from Star Trek's "holodeck" — we haven't the tech yet, but we can postulate that the main issue is just engineering and manufacturing/maintenance costs. As we can see with Large Language Models today, money and resources can be pooled towards what would be considered absolutely impossible a decade ago, to produce the kind of AI conversations in natural language that science-fiction authors have been promising since the early 1950s (at least!) A similar reasoning can be applied to the medical science shown in the movie: several advanced medical procedures which would be novelties for an audience in 1969 (and commonplace to us in 2026), are essentially correct in the movie. This means that some of the script writers were at least familiar with recent technological discoveries and introduced them correctly as part of the plot. Most of it, however, remains unexplained and implausible, more on the side of fantasy/magic than science fiction. Some we can shrug away easily, such as the super-fast healing shown at the beginning, which even doesn't leave any scars. Thanks to a combination of implants, prosthetics, skin grafts, and plastic surgery — all of which became available in the late 1960s, even if just for some selected few — the overall effect is plausible. Brain transplants are not (especially in the way they're shown in the movie), nor is "reading the memory banks of the brain"; but since so many science-fiction stories (especially those coming from Japan!) feature these, one might argue that it's just a logical consequence of the advances in medical science. Others, however, defy the laws of physics — such as taking a bath that gives you immunity against high-velocity projectiles, from bullets to avalanches — and here we should apply 'Wells' Law': it's fine to present a science-fiction scenario where ONE law of physics is bent, broken, or replaced. But stick it to ONE, and one only — the rest MUST be physically correct. Start breaking a lot of laws, and ultimately this is not science fiction any longer, but merely fantasy. One of the very few successful SF series managed to break TWO, and still remain plausible — namely, Star Trek, which introduced one variant of faster-than-life travel (warp engines are actually theoretically possible, and allegedly NASA is working on a very simple prototype since 2016 at least), and teleportation (we have quantum entanglement teleportation, but not above the scale of a few atoms and very simple molecules, and even those are infinitely challenging). A skin lotion that stops the kinetic energy of a bullet is simply impossible, not merely implausible. It would have been far safer and much more realistic to have the characters wear a device producing an extremely strong magnetic field that could *deflect* bullets (technologically impossible even today, but at least plausible — although its usefulness in a real battlefield would be seriously questionable). But then it wouldn't work to deflect rocks, which is also part of the plot. These are the annoying bits for someone who is a serious fan of so-called "hard" science-fiction, which the Japanese scriptwriters usually excel at. Obviously, given the extreme wide range of styles and themes in manga/anime, there are all possible "shades" of believability, from pure magical fantasy, to technofantasy (what Star Wars essentially is), to space opera (such as Battlestar Galactica), to soft science fiction, and, finally, to the hard science fiction of, say, "2001". You can obviously wrap these around other elements; cyberpunk, for instance, is solidly rooted in hard science-fiction (at least when it was first created in the mid-1980s!), but several authors love to add magical fantasy to the mix, often with great success. Japanese authors cover all of those styles, and then some, and they have expert, talented writers able to do a fantastic job, no matter what the style might be. It's a pity that none of those had actually been hired to write the script of "Latitude Zero". In fact, the narrative seems to have a conflict between two visions: one that tries to adhere to "Wells' Law" and attempts to create a plausible scenario; and another which finds the strictness of "not bending the physical laws" an inconvenience to be discarded with the purpose of advancing the plot. Sometimes, both visions are in sync, and you get to see the application of some realistic plot twist (impossible even today, but plausible) which "saves" the characters (such as, say, adapting a submarine to be able to fly, even if we have no idea on how far it can travel that way — this is certainly plausible, just requiring complex, advanced engineering); but more often than not, it's the "magical" elements that sadly spoil the plot. TL;DR? Disappointing. Expected better.
Latitude Zero Trivia
Latitude Zero was released on July 26, 1969.
Latitude Zero was directed by Ishirō Honda.
Latitude Zero has a runtime of 1h 45m.
Latitude Zero was produced by Don Sharpe.
A journalist is saved by a giant submarine captained by a 200-year-old man who takes him to an underwater paradise city where no one ages. That's when monsters and mutants sent by the captain's rival, a 200-year-old scientist, attack.
The key characters in Latitude Zero are Capt. Craig McKenzie / Cmdr. Glenn McKenzie (Joseph Cotten), Dr. Malic / Lt. Hastings (Cesar Romero), Dr. Ken Tashiro (Akira Takarada).
Latitude Zero is rated G.
Latitude Zero is an Action, Adventure, Science Fiction film.
Latitude Zero has an audience rating of 5.9 out of 10.