Christian Bale's Adventure Movie Based On A Classic Book Is The Perfect '90s Nostalgic Watch

Robert Louis Stevenson's "Treasure Island" was first published in 1883 and is still, to this day, the basis of all pirate/adventure stories that followed. If it was assigned to you in school, it's likely that you read it as a fun extracurricular activity. You most certainly saw one of the 50-plus film adaptations of the book, which have been churned out at a pretty constant pace since about 1918, when Fox released Sidney and Chester Franklin's adaptation.

The most famous "Treasure Island" movie is probably the one that Disney released in 1950, starring Robert Newton as Long John Silver and Bobby Driscoll as the young Jim Hawkins, although your age may determine which movie you watched first. Some might recall the 1972 version with Orson Welles, or the animated version from 1973. Some might even best know "Muppet Treasure Island" from 1996, or Disney's animated sci-fi riff "Treasure Planet" from 2002. (Millennials love "Treasure Planet," and /Film has written about it extensively.) And Hollywood isn't done with Stevenson's classic: A new "Treasure Island" TV series is currently in the works. 

An adaptation that fewer audiences may be familiar with is the 1990 TNT version that starred Charlton Heston as Long John Silver, and a young Christian Bale as Jim Hawkins. This was two years before "Newsies," so Bale was only about 15 or 16 years old. The TNT movie was a big deal at the time, and starred a who's-who of notable actors. It came at a time when many cable networks were trying to break into the prestige miniseries game, and audiences were treated to many wild, ambitious TV projects (be sure to read our article on forgotten '90s miniseries). Sadly, most of them (like "Treasure Island") quickly vanished from memory.

The 1990 TV movie was written and directed by Fraser Clarke Heston, Charlton's son, who mostly just collaborated with his father. Fraser wrote and produced the 1982 film "Mother Lode," which Charlton directed, and after "Treasure Island," Fraser directed a 1991 TV movie called "The Crucifer of Blood," in which Charlton played Sherlock Holmes. Heston's best-known movie might be the mostly forgotten 1993 Stephen King adaptation "Needful Things," or the 1996 kiddie adventure flick "Alaska." 

We all know the story of "Treasure Island," and Fraser Heston's 1990 screenplay doesn't stray too far from it. Christian Bale plays Jim Hawkins, an impoverished boy working at the Admiral Benbow, the favorite watering hole of the grizzled former pirate Billy Bones (Oliver Reed), an alcoholic who fears "the one-legged man." A blind pirate named Blind Pew (Christopher Lee) appears one night and presents Billy with a paper bearing a Black Spot. That's a pirate's death sentence. Billy, however, dies of a heart attack while handing Jim a key to his personal chest. Inside is a mysterious treasure map. 

The map, Jim learns, belonged to the infamous pirate Jim Flint, and leads to a treasure island. Jim convinces Squire Trelawney (Richard Johnson) to book a ship to hunt for it. Captain Smollett (Clive Wood) takes command of their vessel, the Hispaniola, and they set off. The ship's cook is the affable Long John Silver (Heston) who, as we all know, has ulterior motives on his voyage. Also in the cast were Julian Glover (from "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade") as Dr. Livesey, and the late, great Pete Postlethwaite.

There aren't a lot of reviews of the 1990 "Treasure Island," meaning that it clearly didn't reach the level of prestige it hoped for. Tom Shales, however, wrote a very unkind review in the Washington Post, focusing mostly on Charlton Heston. Shales hated the film's "plodding" pace, and noted that its 132-minute runtime was puffed out to three hours with interminable commercial breaks. About Charlton Heston, he noted:

"Crucial to the film's failure is the miscasting and embarrassingly poor performance of Charlton Heston as Long John Silver, a laborious mistake from arrival (in the second half hour) to departure. That Heston is one of the most humorless hulks who ever stood before a camera helps not a bit.[...] 'Treasure Island' springs plenty of leaks along the way, but Heston is the one who sinks the ship." 

Shales also remarked on a long, long stalemate between Long John Silver and Captain Smollett, as well as a very-late-in-the-film treasure hunt; it seems that the aforementioned map doesn't actually come into play until the film's final 25 minutes. Even the young Christian Bale, then best known for "Empire of the Sun," was a mistake in Shales' eyes. He wittily said that Bale was "more doleful than baleful as young Jim," adding that his performance "compounds the grim monotony."

But The L.A. Times called it "respectable and fun," and Empire said it was a "rattling good action/adventure epic," so your mileage may vary. 

Shales' review also pointed out that the ship used in "Treasure Island" was the same one constructed for the 1962 remake of "Mutiny on the Bounty," and that it was still quite good-looking. At least this pirate adventure secured a handsome vessel.