I think I'm safe in not giving you a precis of the story. If you haven't read it, or at least the Classics Illustrated Comic, it's good odds you've seen at least one of screen versions.
It's stunningly cast, with Charlton Heston assuming a West Country accent a la Robert Newton, and overplaying Long John Silver to the hilt. Christian Bale plays Jim Hawkins, and the cast is filled out with Oliver Reed, Christopher Lee, Julian Glover, and Pete Postlethwaite.
The real star of the movie is, for me, Robert Steadman, whose lighting and compositions -- he's the cinematographer, you see -- do a fine job of replicating N. C. Wyeth's illustrations for the Harper Edition. True, his blues are not a cobalt as Wyeth's, but the occasional shot made me stare, like the sequence where they find the treasure. Unhappily, the film makers are too much in love with the book, and insist on leaving in sequences that might have made a tighter and better movie. They are, however, handled so lovingly you can understand why director Fraser Heston and editors Eric Boyd-Perkins and Tom Gunn left them in.
It's stunningly cast, with Charlton Heston assuming a West Country accent a la Robert Newton, and overplaying Long John Silver to the hilt. Christian Bale plays Jim Hawkins, and the cast is filled out with Oliver Reed, Christopher Lee, Julian Glover, and Pete Postlethwaite.
The real star of the movie is, for me, Robert Steadman, whose lighting and compositions -- he's the cinematographer, you see -- do a fine job of replicating N. C. Wyeth's illustrations for the Harper Edition. True, his blues are not a cobalt as Wyeth's, but the occasional shot made me stare, like the sequence where they find the treasure. Unhappily, the film makers are too much in love with the book, and insist on leaving in sequences that might have made a tighter and better movie. They are, however, handled so lovingly you can understand why director Fraser Heston and editors Eric Boyd-Perkins and Tom Gunn left them in.