Treasure Planet
I saw a preview for Treasure Planet a while back that I thought was mighty visually impressive; didn't expect much else from the movie, but thought it would look good. I got about what I expected.
I haven't read Treasure Island or seen any of the movies based on it, so I didn't spend any time worrying about whether the movie was true to the original. (But it did make me want to go read the book.) The visuals are great; the sidekicks and comic relief are dumb and annoying; the plot is fine, though the father/family stuff is a little heavy-handed even for Disney. I liked the worldbuilding—I was completely willing to accept 16th-century sailing ships sailing through space, with no concern about air or economic models or physics. I rolled my eyes a little at the emphasis on skateboarding (I know it's as popular as ever, but it feels really mid-'80s to me somehow to have a teen protagonist who's a totally rad skateboarder in a movie), and at some of the weaker attempts at portraying a 15-year-old. But I liked John Silver, though it took a while for him to grow on me, and I adored Emma Thompson as Captain Amelia. Sadly, her role in the second half of the film is much reduced. But it's worth watching the first half just for her. Even if you fast-forward through all the bits she isn't in.
I completely failed to recognize Patrick McGoohan's voice in a very small role as Billy Bones.
I went and looked at Ebert's review, 'cause I think he often says interesting things about movies, and was a little surprised to see him say that, while he had no trouble suspending disbelief, and liked a lot of things about the movie, he was annoyed that they didn't just remake the original story, rather than transplanting it into space. On the one hand, I agree that adding sfnal trappings to a non-sfnal story doesn't make it good sf; but on the other hand, I often like this sort of reimagining. I think the difference for me is that the sfnal elements are (by and large) well-integrated into this story (even if they're lousy science); it's not just a space-kid being taken on a space-ship by space-pirates to a space-treasure, it's a near-seamless melding of 17th-century and (say) 23rd-century styles and technologies. Which I guess amounts to saying It Looks Cool!
