[5] Frank and Samuel are two American cryptographers on Treasure Island during World War II who decode letters and look for hidden meanings behind the words.
"[8] He concluded, "For all the ideas it tosses around -- and many of them are useful and painful correctives to our rose-colored fantasies [of WWII] -- Treasure Island is too crude a movie to muster much rhetorical clout.
Club, Scott Tobias wrote Treasure Island is "a truly audacious American independent with the courage to follow its doggedly idiosyncratic convictions.
Made without so much as a nod to commercial considerations, it stood out among the dramatic-competition entries at Sundance in 1999, when it won a Special Jury Prize alongside such Indiewood fare as Happy, Texas and Guinevere.
But, tempting as it is to praise Treasure Island simply for being different, King's experimental pastiche of '40s technique and late-'90s transgression never quite comes together, falling victim to its own willful obscurity.