Treasure Island is a 1990 British-American made-for-television film adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1883 novel of the same name, written & directed by Fraser Clarke Heston, and also starring several notable British actors, including Christian Bale, Oliver Reed, Christopher Lee, Julian Glover and Pete Postlethwaite. The film was an original production filmed and aired by the TNT network, and was also released theatrically outside the US. The title has appeared on some covers as "Devils Treasure", rather than "Treasure Island". This version of the story is noted for its faithfulness to the book, with much of the dialogue coming directly from it, as well as recreating several of the more violent scenes from the book.
Premise
discovers a treasure map and embarks on a journey to find the treasure, but pirates led by Long John Silver have plans to take the treasure for themselves by way of mutiny.
Treasure Island was filmed in 1989 on location in Cornwall, England, in Jamaica, and also at Pinewood Studios in Buckinghamshire, England. The replica shipBounty II was used as the fictional Hispaniola on film. It was originally constructed for the film "Mutiny on The Bounty", and was set to be destroyed at the end of the film but Marlon Brando protested and the ship was kept intact. It sank off the coast of the Carolinas during Hurricane Sandy in October 2012. According to Allmovie, Charlton Heston "plays the character of Long John Silver as written: a cold, crafty, cunning rogue, by turns charming and deadly, but never to be underestimated" and, unlike other filmed versions of the story, the movie "adheres with utter fidelity to the Stevenson novel". However, Tom Shales of The Washington Post wrote of the film: "The mast ain't all that's mizzen in a dreary and confused new production of Treasure Island...miscasting and embarrassingly poor performance of Charlton Heston as Long John Silver, a laborious mistake from arrival to departure. That Heston is one of the most humorless hulks who ever stood before a camera helps not a bit..."
