‘Treasure Island’ Review: David Oyelowo’s Larger-Than-Life Long John Silver Steals a Messy but Watchable Pirate Adventure

More than fifty adaptations have been made for film, television and series based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic novel Treasure Island. While none of them has been a recent hit (the closest thing to one is Disney’s 2002 animated film Treasure Planet), the universe created by the Scottish writer in 1883 is firmly established in our collective memory, above all as the foundational mythology of the “pirate” genre, complete with parrots, peg legs and flags marked with an “X.” Yes, all of that originates here.

Perhaps to avoid the obvious or to bring the story more in line with contemporary cultural tastes, Robert Murphy’s version makes a number of changes to the original. Some are specific plot and narrative adjustments, while others have to do with the very logic of the story and, above all, its characters. In this Treasure Island, two of the main characters either don’t exist in the original or have been greatly expanded. It is still, in principle, the story of young Jim Hawkins (Tom Sweet) and his journey to the Caribbean in search of a mysterious treasure buried there by the legendary Captain Flint, and of the pirate Long John Silver (David Oyelowo), the peg-legged man with a parrot on his shoulder who embarks on the same journey with the same goal, only posing as the ship’s cook.

The biggest additions and differences from the classic text involve Bess (Hayley Atwell), Jim’s mother, a widowed woman looking for a husband who travels with them aboard the legendary ship Hispaniola. In this version, Bess plays a larger role in the unfolding events than her son Jim, as her presence is what keeps fueling the clashes with Long John. Also aboard the ship is Aaron Graham (Jack Huston), a character who does not exist in the original novel and who, beyond his interest in Bess, harbors a few secrets about his role on the ship, secrets that are gradually revealed as the episodes unfold.

The attempts to give the story a more explicit political dimension and to put a strong female character at its center alter the logic of the narrative to some extent, since the plot no longer quite works as a coming-of-age story for Jim. While that aspect remains somewhere in the background, the character himself has also been altered (he has a perfect photographic memory, which comes in handy for… certain things), and at times he is little more than a privileged spectator to the tensions between his mother, the pirate/cook, Aaron and the ship’s captain, Smollett (Tristan Sturrock), one character who remains more or less as Stevenson imagined him.

Treasure Island presents itself as a fast-paced, energetic series, with characters constantly on the move and plenty of action, closer to Pirates of the Caribbean than to anything more serious and/or historical. Narratively messy but always headed toward a more or less familiar destination, the most interesting thing it has to offer is Oyelowo’s idiosyncratic and curious performance as the peg-legged pirate. With a thick Caribbean accent and the kind of boundless energy you’d expect from a musical —at times you get the feeling he might suddenly break into song and dance— the British actor gives a magnetic performance, to the point that the series noticeably suffers whenever he is off-screen. Atwell tries to match that larger-than-life quality, but it doesn’t always work. Her Bess is so exuberant that at times she seems to have wandered in from a comedy.

With six relatively short episodes, this latest and not particularly remarkable addition to the long list of adaptations of Stevenson’s novel is, at best, a minor and perfectly watchable bit of entertainment, but it never comes close to living up to the fame of the original. One can understand making changes and alterations to give a classic text some freshness —especially when dozens of faithful adaptations have already been made— but in this case they don’t add much. By relegating the novel’s protagonist to a considerably more secondary role, this version of Treasure Island leaves aside the best thing about the original story: seeing a world of adults through the eyes of an adolescent.