This wonderful series is about me. Yeah, that's right. And it is also made about a thousand other boys, who also in childhood got into the hands of the book of the Scottish writer, whose story took away far, far away, where the schooner “Hispaniola” creaks, a lot of salt water, there is a lonely island with buried treasures, often smells of gunpowder, sparkling knives, give out “black marks”, around a lot of colorful characters, a one-legged pirate next to it, instilling fear with ad ad ad, and sweetly sucking under a spoon from real adventures full of intriguing twists. Any boy who read Treasure Island unwittingly found a priceless treasure that enriches for life. It’s not gold at all, it’s more than being the brave Jim Hawkins! Therefore, each smart adaptation of the work always pleasantly excites something very personal, as if you remember your own adventures, seeing them from a slightly different angle, as the next director with a group of actors will play. And the current film does it incredibly curiously, trying to convince us that the adventures took place in space, so it can not be boring! Yes, we all watched a great cartoon from Disney studio about the planet of treasure, but it came out much later, so refer to it unwise.
First of all, the futuristic entourage of the picture, shot in the format of a mini-series, is fascinating to slowly savor the whole work, without rushing through only the tops. Director Antonio Margheriti is more remembered by the audience as the author of all kinds of Italian thrash, imitating, quoting, exploiting a lot of popular themes and genres, trying to join the fashion stream. It is wrong to condemn him, because working with an inexpensive movie, the director has a great hand, being able to do cheaply, but with fiction. For an adventure story, this is very important, and it is immediately noticeable when modest technical possibilities are well played out to please the frequent puppet models of spaceships, and you can fully feel the action-packed spirit of the story with chases, fights, intrigues and everything else gleaned from the book pages. With the excitement of a magician hiding transparent threads on the screen, Margherity recreates a fictional world, weaving in it the past and the future, showing ancient stone streets of Rome leading to glass cosmodromes, and star flights with meteorites decorates with songs about the dead man’s chest, coming from the mouths of purely pirated faces.
It is the faces of the international cast that the picture pleases in the second place. It should be noted that before us the film adaptation is quite inaccurate, and we are not talking about futurism. Some scenes have changed noticeably, the pirate severity of the book has decreased, because, for example, our favorite lanky John Silver could easily kill an honest sailor in front of the team, and here with this case everything is a little smoother, tentatively on television rating and a possible young age, who simply will not understand the specifics of the criminal male collective and authority in it, where the captain must be cruel, otherwise the sinister Flint himself would not be afraid, and if he is afraid, he respects you. But it doesn't make it worse. On the contrary, the current one-legged pirate turned out to be very interesting, having inherited much from the book prototype. The charm of Anthony Quinn harmoniously combined with the spelled out charm of the character, showing him not as a pirate - a murderer and a criminal, but as a pirate - an adventurer, a gentleman of luck, but still the same free person, living according to a personal code of honor, accustomed to relying on a dodgy natural cunning and being respected for wisdom. The gray-haired actor definitely felt the necessary symbiosis of relations with his young colleague Ithaco Nardulli, who a couple of years later will die in an accident, remembering us as an eternal boy from the island and the story of the secret of the Sahara - the series is such. The revered leader of the gang, who relates like a grandfather-mentor to the screen youth, perfectly complements the main character-naughty, rushing soul and body between two hot lights, balancing between the “good” and “bad”, which is also equally good. These two principles of positive and negative, in fact, interpret the same thing differently, equally appealing to a sense of duty, responsibility, honesty, friendship. Observing this subtle psychology against the background of adventure is no less interesting than reading about it.
Other actors-characters are also successful. For example, David Warbeck accurately conveyed Dr. Livesey, showing the right example of boundless bravery and honor of a man with a military past and a medical vocation in the present. That's what we read, that's what we wanted to be when we grew up. Trelawney - Philippe Leroy - is shown, as befits a squire, a little comical from carelessness even in the most dangerous moments, and Captain Smollett - Klaus Levich - was extremely serious, as a living embodiment of drill and inexorable discipline. Stanko Molnar performs a robot with the last touching human wish, whose only hero cleverly replaced several book servants at once. Naturally, there is no escape without Hands, who is an episodic but important participant in the events, appearing in interesting scenes. It turned out controversial - Giovanni Lombardo Radice, as always, without complaints coped with the negative role, showing an angry and rebellious character, resembling a ruthless vulture, but the author, alas, did not bring into the film a fascinating book fight with young Jim, forgetting that it was the wounded Hands who helped the boy control the ship. In the absence of this, an artistic blunder inevitably surfaces. Many other lyceums will be in the film, and all of them are also well-known, individual, who managed to fill the story with unique personal colors.
I think that a good adventure film cannot be fully conveyed in words, especially if it is an exciting journey in dangerous space, on an abandoned giant star liner, a distant planet, a ship with a team of pirates, where everything always happens or alliances break up. It is best to go on an exciting flight for seven episodes, because the author did an excellent job, adapting the book to the genre of fiction, delighting with interesting new interpretations of familiar scenes, and changing the original material in places, so that even the reader felt the general novelty and plot intrigue until the end.
8 out of 10