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THE ISLAND
Rating: 
USA. 1980.
Director – Michael Ritchie, Screenplay/Based on the Novel by Peter Benchley, Producers – David Brown & Richard Zanuck, Photography – Henri Decae, Sea Photography – Neil Roach, Music – Ennio Morricone, Visual Effects – Albert Whitlock, Makeup – Bob Westmoreland & Stan Winston, Production Design – Dale Hennessey. Production Company – Zanuck-Brown.
Cast:
Michael Caine (Blair Maynard), Jeffrey Frank (Justin Maynard), David Warner (Jean-David Nau), Angela Punch MacGregor (Bess), Frank Middlemass (Dr Windsor), Colin Jeavons (Hizzoner), Don Henderson (Rollo)
Plot: Journalist Blair Maynard is sent to Florida by his editor to investigate the phenomenal number of disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle area – some six thousand boats gone missing in three years. Out at sea with his 12 year-old son Justin, Maynard sees somebody on a liferaft waving for help, but this turns out to be a trap. They are captured by what they discover to be the modern day ancestors of seventeenth century buccaneers. They have lived for 300 years undiscovered by modern civilization and survive by raiding the ships in the area. Maynard is taken to add new stock to the pirates’ badly interbred gene pool. Meanwhile while Justin is adopted by the group’s leader Jean-David Nau and to Maynard’s distress happily gives himself over to the bloodthirsty pirate lifestyle.
The enormous hit of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) propelled Peter Benchley, who wrote the book that Jaws was based on, to the status of best-selling novelist. All of Peter Benchley’s works center around sea-going adventure. Jaws producers David Brown and Richard Zanuck subsequently went onto make the passably entertaining Caribbean treasure hunting film The Deep (1977) from Benchley’s novel and then returned with this adaptation of Benchley’s 1979 novel, which proved to be a box-office flop.
There is the grain of a good idea in The Island, one where Benchley inventively explains away the Bermuda Triangle disappearances as being caused by a lost culture descended from pirates. (The Bermuda Triangle was largely a tabloid myth, with a not-untoward number of disappeared ships being distorted out of shape and out of location to make the dubious case for the existence of the zone). Benchley’s creativity is occasionally seen where some thought has gone into the pirate’s degenerated social rituals and particularly their collisions with the modern world. Most amusing of these is an encounter between a cutlass-wielding buccaneer and a kung fu artist.
But outside of these occasionally inventive ideas, The Island is not trying to be anything more an action thriller. Writing the screen adaptation himself, Peter Benchley seems to want to make it into a primal rights of manhood film along the lines of Deliverance (1972). It is certainly a surprisingly violent film, although here at least Benchley is showing pirate behaviour with a much greater regard to historical realism and the real brutality with which it was conducted than any sanitised traditional Hollywood swashbuckler. But under the hands of Michael Ritchie, The Island thunders and bangs with blundering tedium and emerges as no more than an exercise in phoney machismo.
The British-born Michael Ritchie was a director who has made some occasionally decent films – Downhill Racer (1969), The Candidate (1972), Prime Cut (1972) – but whose ventures into fantasy – the Eddie Murphy vehicle The Golden Child (1986), the fairy godmother comedy A Simple Wish (1997) and The Fantasticks (2000) – were leaden flops.
Copyright Richard Scheib 1999-2012
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