Director Shawn Seet (whose credits include Two Fists, One Heart) and screenwriter Justin Monjo, update the story to modern times, which makes for a riveting family-friendly story with the addition of Geoffrey Rush who plays grown-up Storm boy and Jai Courtney as Storm boy's father. A grown-up Storm boy, Michael Kingley, tells the story of his childhood to his granddaughter, Maddy, in the hopes that she doesn't repeat his painful history by rebelling against her father.īased on the adaptation of Colin Thiele's Australian children's book, the new version isn't exactly the same as the 1976 predecessor but it hits the same tender and touching moments.
He forms a friendship with an orphaned pelican, Mr Percival that changes his life forever. Storm boy lives a lonely existence with his father Hideaway Tom, in an isolated remote area of Coorong, South Australia. But in the new film, by literally creating a bust of the bird – as if a clump of stone or plaster could compare with the natural majesty of wings and feathers – the meaning has been accidentally inverted: a story about how something can never die becomes about how it will never live again.Storm Boy is the story of a boy, who forms an unlikely friendship with a pelican, which remains as mesmerising as ever with the recent remake. Safran’s film looked up to the skies, evoking the wonderful flying creature as a symbol of eternal beauty, its wings flapping in hearts and minds as much as in the universe. Suffice to say that Seet doesn’t get the balance right, creating an experience more depressing than optimistic. Without revealing how the film’s conclusion unfolds, the moral question at the core of it (a simple one, about business versus conservation) is placed in the “too hard” basket, with one key character abdicating themself of moral responsibility by handballing an important decision to somebody else.īut the biggest downer involves the fate of one of the principal characters, which will not be disclosed here.
Photograph: Matt Nettheim/Stormy Productions Trevor Jamieson as Fingerbone Bill, with Finn Little as Mike ‘Storm Boy’ Kingley. The protagonist receives friendship and spiritual counsel from local Indigenous man Fingerbone Bill (the naturally charismatic Trevor Jamieson). This beloved character – a fixture of our national cinema and literature – is a gregarious human-loving bird, preferring to point his long schnoz in the direction of people rather than the water. We observe his young self fostering motherless baby pelicans, one of whom becomes the family pet, Mr Percival. But, as the grown-up Kingley explains to his granddaughter, the conversations between them forming a bedtime story framing device, “one day the world came to me.” That past involves Kingley as a child (the fresh-faced Finn Little, who has great presence) living on Ninety Mile beach with his father Tom (Jai Courtney, delivering a fine performance as a reserved but not unemotional man).įather and son are cut off off from the world. Seet and the cinematographer Bruce Young (who recently shot the excellent Blue Murder: Killer Cop and the laughable Bite Club) indulge in fish-eye style compositions, with blurry edges that evoke a dreamy past. It is a strikingly surreal opener, with a rich cinematic texture that comes and goes throughout the rest of the film.
The room’s floor-to-ceiling glass window shatters and everybody exits except for Kingley, who, as if in trance, walks towards it, noticing a pelican outside perched on a light post. There are intense grey clouds, rumblings of thunder and heavy rain. In a meeting room high up in the building, Kingley observes a grey and foreboding metropolis – starkly contrasting the glistening aqua water and silky sand dunes of Coorong, South Australia, where much of the film is based. Morgana Davies and Geoffrey Rush in a scene from Storm Boy.
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