SpuffyWeb Sadly Over-hyped

GarnettTeenage The film was still a fun one that will make you laugh and have you leaving the theater feeling like you just stole something valuable and got away with it.

Aneesa Wardle The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Deanna There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

blrnani There is no point being faithful to a book written far in the past if you want to make money from the film, as the cultural bridge would just be too huge. Nevertheless, I think this film does a good job of adapting the story for a late 20thC audience. Perhaps its biggest achievement is that you don't think "Bond" at all, once you move beyond the opening fight scene. The notion that a year at sea will make everything okay, in a country notorious for nurturing grievances over centuries, stretches credibility, but one can understand he's loth to be parted any longer than that from his great love. By the same token, the idea that she would've waited over 6 years for him to come back to her, in an age when a woman's only hope of preserving/improving her standard of living was to obtain a good marriage, beggars belief, but is nicely romantic, amid the immediacy of our present times (cf. the ending of Cast Away). "Swiss Family Robinson" is more fun as an adventure story, while "Cast Away" handles the logistical and emotional challenges of being alone on a Pacific island superbly. Robinson Crusoe's strength is in bridging the cultural divide between a Christian European and a cannibalistic islander at a time when the former considered themselves so superior to the latter that slavery was considered normal practice - showing the common bond between humans that transcends all the superficial differences of gender, ethnicity, nationality, religion, class, etc that so easily divide us. So there is plenty of food for thought here, but it can also be enjoyed as a simple adventure story.

Rob_Taylor So. This is an adaptation of Daniel Defoe's story. A rather loose adaptation, I must say. It has the basic plot, but veers a little off course throughout in order to make the movie more entertaining and give it a little action.In itself, that's not a bad thing. I think the spirit of the book was kept, if not the letter. But hey! It's a reworking of a book written nearly three hundred years ago, so of course it's going to be prone to modern storytelling techniques and manipulation.It's basically a TV movie but they managed, somehow, to rope Pierce Brosnan into this. Not a bad thing, since he lends some credibility to the character of Crusoe.Since its been more than thirty years since I read the book, I won't try and pick faults with the screenplay's differences from the novel. Except just this one thing....I don't remember the book well, but I'm almost positive that, in the book, there isn't a beach scene with white-painted palm trunks and a "NO Barbeques on the beach" sign. I blinked and had to rewind the DVR for that. But there it is. A shockingly badly chosen piece of stock footage with the aforementioned sign right in the foreground! Actually, it was too blurry to read anything other than the "NO" part. But it says "NO" something, that's for sure! I'm wondering if a second watch through will reveal tire-tracks in the sand, or discarded drinks cans, etc! Whoever left that in needs to be sacked. C'mon! Just cut that bit out. It only lasts a second or two! But its glaringly obvious. Talk about ruining immersion! Awful editing aside, Crusoe is not a bad film. It tries to send a message of tolerance and understanding, of friendship and love. For the most part, that succeeds fairly well but it is a trifle overdone. Crusoe's (Brosnan's) narration is sometimes needless but not distracting and the movie is fairly good entertainment if there's nothing better to watch.SUMMARY: Fairly decent TV movie. One hideous editing screw-up. Not too long. Worth watching if you have a couple of hours to kill.

duraflex Brosnan is excellent as Robinson Crusoe and the actor playing Friday also does a decent job. There's plenty of adventure and excitement and the movie really chugs along. There is excessive violence and some very implausible battling of the cannibal tribe that comes to the island. Overall however, it makes for a rather entertaining film. My big problem is that it's titled "DANIEL DEFOE'S ROBINSON CRUSOE". It is not. It is well beyond an adaptation or artistic license.It has been many years since I read the book as a kid and as I watched the movie I was thinking - I don't remember a duel with swords. I don't remember this or that. Didn't Crusoe convert Friday to Christianity? And I don't remember Crusoe and Friday going back to Friday's island. In the book, they didn't. It wasn't my memory, it was the movie. The book is a true classic - the movie is okay but not at all true to the book.

taylor_mayed SOME MILD SPOILERS. MOSTLY DOG-BASED.I'd only just finished reading Daniel Defoe's famous novel Robinson Crusoe the previous day when I happened to glance at the TV listings and notice that Channel 5 were showing this 1996 film adaptation in the middle of the afternoon. So, sticking a tape in to record it, I settled down later that evening intrigued to see what the producers had made of a story that was still so fresh in my mind.Robinson Crusoe is not a novel with a hell of a lot of plot to it, so it's understandable that if you're making a film of it you have to try and make it a little more dynamic, or else you'll just end up with an hour and a half of a man cutting down trees, sowing crops and raising goats. The duel- and woman-based storyline grafted onto the beginning and end of the film here isn't much of a one, however, with Crusoe fleeing a murder charge in eighteenth century Scotland and taking to sea.Quite apart from the moving of the events of the story from the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries by the film-makers, if Crusoe is a Yorkshireman in the book and he's being played here by an Anglicised Irishman in Pierce Brosnan, then why the hell is he Scottish? Brosnan can't even do the accent particularly well, so it seems a very strange choice indeed. I can only imagine it was an attempt to cash-in on the success of the film's contemporary, Braveheart, which had seen great success with a Scottish character and setting. The only effect it has here though is leading the film-makers to include a couple of dire and cringe-worthy bagpipe scenes.The other major problem the film has is the condensing of the story – not just shrinking down the events of the novel (where they actually bother including them), but reducing Crusoe's stay on the island from twenty-eight to a mere six years. While this is understandable in terms of making their framing plot work, it leads to such lunacy as Crusoe apparently being able to teach Friday good conversational English within six months.Speaking of Friday, who is here far more vital to events than he ever is in the book, it's perhaps understandable and indeed commendable that he's made more of Crusoe's equal and not the happily subservient savage he remains in the novel. That said, however, they do go overboard in loading on the touchy-feely 'let's all be friends, wasn't slavery a bad thing, all religions are equal' message which, while undoubtedly worthy, are very awkward when tacked onto a story that was very much a product of its times, for better or for worse. On the other hand, however, the friendship between Crusoe and Friday here and the eventual climax of the film between the two of them is probably a punchier ending than Defoe gave to the original novel, which sort of fizzles out with a load of nonsense including wrestling bears in the snow in its original form.There are numerous other problems – Crusoe does have a canine companion rescued from the same ship he was on in the book, so that's faithful enough, but he was a little too cutesy here for my liking, and what the hell was the point in blowing the bloody thing up? They probably realised they wouldn't be able to do anything else with it further on in the film and thus thought of this rather silly way of killing the thing. Even more ridiculously, later on once the enemy tribe reach Crusoe's settlement in the final battle, what's the first thing they do? Desecrate poor old Skipper's grave – cue vengeful-looking close-up of Crusoe. For goodness sake… There's also the fact that as the initial stages of his exile pass by so quickly, we get to see little of Crusoe's ingenuity in settling into his surroundings, finding ways of providing for himself and building his settlement.Perhaps to trick viewers who haven't read the novel into thinking that this is an accurate representation of it, the makers of the film include a couple of short scenes at the beginning and end of Daniel Defoe being presented with Robinson Crusoe's journal by an eager friend who thinks he should turn it into a book. "I must write this!" the previously reluctant Defoe enthuses in the second of these scenes near the end of the film, having now read the manuscript. They fail to depict him going on to say "well not this exactly, I mean I might use the same name and basic main plot idea, but I'll need to make a hell of a lot of changes…" "Daniel Defoe died in 1731, but the story of Robinson Crusoe lives on," a caption just before the end credits tells us. And so it does, but not in this film I'm afraid. While there may be some passable entertainment value here for those who are just interested in it as a film in its own right, as a literary adaptation it's distinctly average, at best. Not one to make any special effort to see, unless perhaps you're a Pierce Brosnan completist.