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It is within the dreamy, exquisitely shot flashback sequences of young Michael raising his pelicans and slowly rebuilding his relationship with his broken father that S torm Boy really shines. Source: Sony.Īgainst all odds, Michael and Bill manage to keep the baby pelicans alive, and the birds, now named Mr Proud, Mr Ponder and Mr Percival, become beloved (and very naughty) members of the household. Finn Little in Storm Boy with Mr Percival. It is during the rescue of the chicks that Michael becomes friends with Fingerbone Bill (played by Trevor Jamieson), an Aboriginal man who has also been forced to live apart from his people. It is during one of Michael’s long days of isolation by the waterways that he comes across three newborn pelican chicks who have been left alone in their nest to die after their mother was killed by poachers. He spends his days alone on the water fishing and working, leaving Michael to wander the shoreline alone. His father, “Hideaway Tom” (played by Jai Courtney), has retreated from the world after suffering a terrible personal tragedy.
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His son-in-law is aggressively trying to push the vote through but his teenage granddaughter is opposed to it, and threatens to hold Michael accountable for the fate of the land.Īnd so the movie flips back in time to Michael’s childhood as he tells his granddaughter about his life as a child living in an isolated beachside shack on the edge of Coorong National Park, 100 miles southeast of Adelaide. The present day scenes of the film are set within downtown Adelaide where Rush’s version of Michael Kingley, now a retired and weary businessman, is waiting for his company to vote on a proposal to lease land in Western Australia to a mining company. The movie is based on Colin Thiele’s classic children’s book of the same name and is a reimagining of the beloved 1976 movie, facts that ensure this enduring Aussie story has a strong and devoted fan base already in place.Īs with past iterations of the story, 2019’s Storm Boy slips back and forth between the past and present life of Mike Kingley, played as a child by Finn Little and as an adult by Geoffrey Rush. This is a conundrum facing the new Australian movie Storm Boy, which drops into cinemas this week. On the flip side, however, it also means that your new offering can rarely be seen as a triumph in its own right. In one instance, it gifts your project with an enticing layer of curiosity as audiences flock to see how their favourite story has been revamped and reimagined. The 1976 film, which was directed by Henri Safran, features David Gulpilil (“Walkabout”), who makes a cameo appearance in the new version.Remaking a classic story can be both a blessing and a curse. In the present, meanwhile, Maddie asks granddad Michael to tell her the story of “the birds.” The two plot lines interweave and reach their endings together.
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Percival, and for a time the four “youngsters” frolic in Edenic bliss in the wave-swept and sandy wild. Meanwhile, back in the past, Michael succeeds in raising the three pelicans, the smallest of which he names (ahem) Mr. Maddie is furious with her father and tries to enlist her grandfather in her cause. In scenes set in the present day, grandfather and business executive Michael Kingley (Geoffrey Rush, also an executive producer), wrangles with his greedy son and environmentalist granddaughter Maddie (Morgana Davies) over plans to turn pristine land into a mining operation. Michael succeeds in keeping the birds alive with pulped fish with the help and encouragement of another coastal recluse, an aboriginal man named Fingerbone Bill (Trevor Jamieson of “Rabbit-Proof Fence”). In flashbacks, Tom’s home-schooled son Michael (a very good Finn Little), who learns vocabulary reading William Goldman’s “The Lord of the Flies,” finds three pelican hatchlings left orphaned by hunters. Like its predecessor, “Storm Boy” tells the story of a lonely child growing up in semi-seclusion on the Southern Australian coast with his father, “Hideaway Tom” Kingley (Jai Courtney), a fisherman whose wife and daughter were killed in an accident.
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