It’s just a shame that the core of the story is lost in these larger pursuits.A tenderly retold tale about the healing bond between a lonely Australian boy and the orphaned pelicans he rescues and nurtures to adulthood, Shawn Seet’s “Storm Boy” - a new version of the classic 1976 film - capably weathers the decades, buoyed by a graceful Geoffrey Rush performance.īuilding in a multigenerational theme not found in the original production or the 1964 Colin Thiele novella, the updated story (penned by Justin Monjo) is seen through the eyes of Rush’s Michael Kingley, a retired executive increasingly haunted by images of his childhood, raised by his reclusive father (Jai Courtney) along the remote Coorong National Park coastline. Yet it’s a story worth telling because it does have a lot to say about the way humans treat our natural world, and serves as an antithesis to the pro-mining Red Dog: True Blue. Indeed, you could excise the entirety of the Rush segments – which is probably a good idea at the moment – and not suffer for it. If this had been just another straight remake of Thiele, Henri Safran’s 1976 film would render the whole thing null and void. The character of Fingerbone is only marginally more rounded than his 1976 counterpart.
The awkward relationship between Rush and his on-screen granddaughter Davies doesn’t give either of them much to do except mope and pout respectively. His visuals are perhaps only hampered by some occasionally dodgy bits of CG pelicans and storms.įinn Little (also of Tidelands fame) is a solid find and holds his own against Courtney and Jamieson. Don’t you feel so much better about Storm Boy’s final touching scenes with the pelican once you are safe in the knowledge he grows up to be an embittered millionaire alcoholic? (The boy, not the pelican).Ĭinematographer Bruce Young, fresh off the Netflix debut of Tidelands, breaks out of the small screen with some impressive photography of the South Australian coastline and its surrounds. Yet the new additions create something of a quandary: who is the audience here? A heavy-handed environmental message of the adult Mike coming to terms with his legacy clashes with the central story at best, and undercuts it completely at other times. The core story remains unchanged, including the fateful dealings with the hunters on the shore. Framed as a morality tale the adult Mike tells Madeline, we see how the young ‘Storm Boy’ (Finn Little) grew up in a remote location raising three orphaned pelicans alongside his father (Jai Courtney) and Fingerbone Bill (Trevor Jamieson), an Aboriginal man with his own reasons for being in isolation.
When Monjo and Seet stick to the original narrative, the film is at its strongest. The primary addition is the overarching linking segment in which an ageing Mike Kingley (Geoffrey Rush) is guilted by his young granddaughter Madeline (Morgana Davies) into taking action against her father’s highly protested mining dealings.
Theile’s relatively simple tale about a lonely boy and his pelican is significantly expanded by Justin Monjo’s script, turning it into something…odd. For debut director Shawn Seet, updating a classic comes burdened with external expectations. Colin Thiele’s original children’s book has been adapted for the stage and screen several times since its debut in the 1960s, each reinterpreting the story for a new generation. Another adaptation of an Australian classic story gets muddled up with a political subplot that isn’t entirely sure who the audience is.Īustralians have spent well over half a century watching a boy develop a relationship with a pelican.
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