Swiss Family Robinson (1960)
Directed by Ken Annakin
After being shipwrecked, the Robinson family is marooned on an island inhabited only by an impressive array of wildlife. In true pioneer spirit, they quickly make themselves at home but soon face a danger even greater than nature: dastardly pirates.
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What critics compared Swiss Family Robinson to
The story is an agreeable, scattershot affair combining notions from several of Verne's fantasy adventures with a "Swiss Family Robinson" formula of puppy love and family bonding.
It’ll also earn them some mockery from the locals, especially Tonowari and Ronal’s own teenage children, in a story that sometimes plays like a teen surfing movie by way of “Swiss Family Robinson.”
The explosive finale is booby traps galore, but unlike the family friendly pratfalls of “Home Alone” (1990) or “Swiss Family Robinson” (1960), this one is the gory culmination of an overly graphic film.
It's "Swiss Family Robinson," or that 1970s series of films about "The Wilderness Family."
In the tradition of “The Mosquito Coast” and “Running on Empty” (and going back further, “Swiss Family Robinson”), “Captain Fantastic” is all about a family that has gone off the grid in a big way and is now living off the land, isolated from the modern world and all its evil entrapment.
Written and directed by Matt Ross (“28 Hotel Rooms”), the film at times suggests a Disney movie in the “Swiss Family Robinson” mode with enough Oedipal conflicts to fill a five-gallon bucket.
For this cinematic clan, life is something like The Royal Tenenbaums meets Swiss Family Robinson , with traces of The Great Santini mixed in.
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A man stranded on a desert island has served as the premise for classic literature like Robinson Crusoe and Swiss Family Robinson, and has even figured into the recent fad of wildly popular and intellectually barren TV shows like Survivor.
However, it works by virtue of viewer identification with the situation: you constantly ask yourself what you would do in a similar situation, since it�s a notion anyone bred on a diet of Swiss Family Robinson and Gilligan�s Island has entertained on occasion.
Incorporating disparate genre archetypes (the movie mixes "Swiss Family Robinson" with "Ten Little Indians" by way of "Alien"), "Pitch Black" provides a thrill ride from its chaotic opening scenes (in which a transport vehicle is forced to make a crash landing) to its surprising outcome.
The Glade is also well conceived, as a Swiss Family Robinson meets The Lord of the Flies social order of wooden huts and towers amid grassy fields and a forest.
Essentially, "Trainspotting" is to "Braveheart" what "Lord of the Flies" was to "Swiss Family Robinson."
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…it forces in a Swiss Family Robinson subplot with the uninteresting Delgado family…