My book, The Seastead Chronicles, features seasteads—habitats located at sea. TV shows and movies have included seasteads as well. Let’s review them.
On the Surface
People find it easier to build, and travel to, seasteads on the ocean’s surface—whether free-floating, anchored, or mounted on pilings—than the underwater kind. Movies and TV shows depict surface seasteads in a variety of ways.
F.P.1 (1932) This German film involves a floating airport to refuel aircraft in the Atlantic Ocean.
Waterworld (1995) This movie—likely the most famous seastead movie— takes place in a future flooded Earth. People live in floating scrap metal towns or on old supertankers.
Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones (2002) In this film, we see Tipocu City on stilts above the oceans of the planet Kamino.
Star Wars: Clone Wars (2003) An animated TV series, it depicts a water world with cities supporting two species—the air-breathing Mon Calamari and the water-breathing Quaren.
The Book of Life (2014) In this animated children’s movie, the guitar-shaped city of San Angel rests on a lake.
Psycho-Pass: The Movie (2015) The film depicts a floating city in the Pacific called Shambala Float.
Mortal Engines (2018) Most cities in this film rove on land using tank treads, but some raft-cities float.
Last Sentinel (2023) The setting for this movie is a small sea-based fort on a flooded future Earth.
Acid City (2026) This dystopian film depicts a city floating in toxic water.
Underwater
Cities on the seabed provide imaginative and exotic settings for many TV shows and movies.
The Underwater City (1962) The film shows characters establishing a sea-bottom city as a bomb shelter.
City Under the Sea (1965) Based loosely on a poem by Edgar Allan Poe, and also known as War-Gods of the Deep, this movie depicts the discovery of a lost city on the seabed. People have been living there for more than a century.
Captain Nemo and the Underwater City (1969) The captain rules his own domed, lit-up city, called Templemer, in this film.
Latitude Zero (1969) This movie introduces a utopian seabed city where citizens don’t age or die.
City Beneath the Sea (1971) This Irwin Allen film includes an underwater city called Pacifica in the year 2053. They face danger from an Earth-bound planetoid.
Warlords of Atlantis (1978) Also known as Warlords of the Deep, this movie features telepathic Martians living in Atlantis. Thanks to Plato, Atlantis became a magic place name for many TV shows and movies.
The Abyss (1989) This James Cameron film includes a seastead less like a city than a seafloor oil drilling platform. I still include it on this list since people would live as well as work there.
Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001) In this Disney picture, Atlanteans have lived in their sunken city for thousands of years.
Aquaman (2018) – This movie also features water-breathing Atlanteans living in their underwater city.
Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) The underwater city in this film is home to humans who worship Godzilla.
The Little Mermaid (2023) In this movie, the mer-people live in Atlantica.
Conclusion
Creators of TV shows and movies have given us a variety of seasteads, but we need more. That’s the opinion of the author of The Seastead Chronicles—
Poseidon’s Scribe
