With Sony releasing the film in Australia on January 17, and Good Deed Entertainment taking US rights for an expected spring North American release, Storm Boy faces a hurdle more problematic than any adjustments to the beloved coming-of-age story: the prominence of Rush among its cast. Storm Boy’s lengthy flashbacks never feel like a straightforward rehash of the initial film, which has long been an Australian primary school mainstay When director Shawn Seet and screenwriter Justin Monjo insert modern context to the main narrative, however, the Jai Courtney and Geoffrey Rush-starring family-friendly drama becomes less effective. While a new version might not strictly be necessary, this film hits all of the earnestly heartfelt beats when it flies close to the crux of its Australian Film Institute Award-winning 1976 predecessor. The tale of a boy and his pelican best friend remains as tender and touching as ever in Storm Boy, the second adaptation of Colin Thiele’s Australian children’s book of the same name. ![]() 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.Dir. 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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