Captain Blood .... in Space!

We've been meandering our way through some famous pirate movies of the early 20th century this summer (since the pirate discourse shifted to the silver screen from the 1920s onward) and one of the less interesting pirate movies we've watched has been Captain Blood. Although it held great promise, what with the dashing charms of Errol Flynn, the background of the Monmouth Rebellion, a man named Blood, and swashbuckling on the high seas, it was actually marked only by the quicksilver shifting of the protagonists' motivations and character, the incomprehensibility of the plot, and a grand total of one somewhat lackluster sword fight. (Please note this is not a sneering condemnation of old movies held up against the glittering, CGI-enhanced jewel of Pirates of the Caribbean; The Black Pirate from 1926 was an infinitely more exciting film with several way-cool sword fights.)

However, in complete disregard for my lousy review, it turns out that Warner Brothers are playing to remake Captain Blood ... by setting it in outer space! Producer Bill Gerber explains:

"When it comes to swashbuckling, you just couldn't go back to the pirate era, not once you've experienced the juggernaut that is 'Pirates of the Caribbean,' '' he explains. "So we needed to find a new way to tell the story."

For Gerber, the best option was not a present-day story involving the Somali pirates -- who are probably too vile and desperate to base an entertainment around -- but a story set a couple of hundred years in the future. "It's still the classic 'Captain Blood' storyline: Peter Blood has been wronged by the powers-that-be and he wants to get even. But the best way to recreate that is by putting it in space, where you can have a totalitarian style of government that's actually pretty similar to what England was like in the 17th century."

This is some pretty informative commentary, as it notes both the shifts that happened in contemporary pirate discourse that accompanied Pirates of the Caribbean as well as the Somali pirate attacks. And while I'm a bit skeptical of sword fights in outer space, there's precedent for space pirates and Geoff Boucher imagines a "live-action version of the Disney film Treasure Planet" which was sort of ok. Ultimately, there's no doubt that, far from being "a partnership that never should have begun," the new Captain Blood has the potential for great box office success, bringing together as it does three of America's favorite things to watch on screen: space, pirates, and (if this LA Times blogger has his way) Robert Pattinson.

Here, for your entertainment, is the swashbuckling scene from the 1935 Captain Blood (skip ahead to 3:44):