Fresh and Exciting

Excellent but underrated film

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Watching it is like watching the spectacle of a class clown at their best: you laugh at their jokes, instigate their defiance, and "ooooh" when they get in trouble.

Solid but uninspired movie which could have been profitably edited down by around 45 minutes. I can't remember the original plot too well anymore, but I believe that this production does seem to reflect some modern liberal political sensibilities, which likely weren't there originally--in and of itself, this is a legitimately different twist to put on things, except that it throws a few forced clunkers into the script. The performances by Izzard as a subdued Silver and Wood as Jim are pretty strong, but, Sutherland, as with all of his later movies, is just cashing a paycheck and does not at all seem invested in, or appropriate to, the role. Also, as a long-time small boat sailor, it kind of drove me nuts that they never raised more sail than they did--my guess is that this is not historically accurate, but instead reflected the limited budget of the movie, meaning that they didn't want to shell out for the cost of additional sails for the ship. If the movie was going to be dragged out to three hours, I personally wanted a lot more exciting sailing action. The production values are not quite up to that of a theater quality film, but compare favorably to those of a top-notch TV production. A perfect movie to watch with children if one wants to avoid sex and extreme violence, but for a modern adult audience, as long as liberties were going to be taken, it could maybe have been a bit grittier. Still, I can't say that I feel that I have wasted three hours or anything like that, and I'm not really significantly disappointed in any way at all, except for the dearth of sailing action.

OK my main gripe with this adaptation of the book is it takes too many liberties with the original story and the characters as well, Dr Livesey goes from the main hero to a sniveling coward, Squire Trelawney goes from a trustworthy leader to a two faced greedy tyrannical land owner and the protagonists don't turn on each other and Jim DOESN'T throw the loot overboard when its time to return home and he doesn't free Silver as in the original story its clear he doesn't trust him. Some of the back story of Blind Pew, Black Dog and their relationship with Long John Silver was explored however this removed the shock of the apple barrel scene when Jim overhears the pirates planning the mutiny which is one of the most iconic parts of the story, and in fact renders the whole scene pointless. That said in spite of those negatives there were a few positives with this adaptation, we finally got to see the infamous Captain Flint in person, played superbly by Donald Sutherland if only for a short time, the portrayal of Captain Smollett was one of the few character's the movie got right. Casting Caribbean actors in some of the roles was a clever touch as pirate crews at the time of the did tend to have people from that part of the world, although some of the choices were rather odd, mainly because the actors were generally too young to poetry their characters in a realistic fashion, Elijah Wood as Ben Gunn was such an example, in regard to Eddie Izzard as Long John Silver, again like most other apsects, not bad. So to sum up it was worth watching once but I won't bother watching it again.

The acting was very decent and the cinematography was quite good for a made for TV movie. The biggest problem was how the movie is very dark and how it completely changes a few critical characters from the book. Livesey comes of as a bumbling,incompetent person and trelawney is just a hateful character. Ben gunn was very annoying and probably the only character that looks like you would imagine from the book. The captain's character was very well played as well. I wish I could undo watching this movie- it just spoiled the classic for me. For the life of me I cannot understand why the changes were made. It would have been an excellent movie if they stuck to the book. Save your money and avoid this movie.

Stevenson's Treasure Island was one of my favorite childhood books I used to read over and over again. Currently I can't remember its nuances - the plot of course I do - and I enjoyed the 2012 version. Background and costumes seems realistic and one can notice at once that it non-US movie - compared to Pirates of the Caribbean, for example.Izzard, Regbo, Sutherland and Wood are very good, the rest are just above average - or their characters are too "simple" to make some real shine out of them. On the other hand, it is good that no one really steals the show as Depp does when portraying Jack Sparrow. Fight scenes, collusions etc are also more "medieval" here.In short, highly recommended for those fond of historic adventures, and not seeking deep philosophy or reasoning.