The latest incarnation of Colin Thiele’s 1963 classic children’s book Storm Boy adds a contemporary frame and explicit ecological concerns.
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Producers of this new version would like it known that they did not set out to remake the 1976 film by Henri Safran. Just as well.
The much-loved original never puts a foot wrong. A remake was unlikely to match its innocence and emotional subtlety.
The new script, by Justin Monjo, bookends the story with a modern and mechanical wrap-around in which Geoffrey Rush (grown up Storm Boy, whose real name was Mike Kingley,) returns from overseas to discover his teenage granddaughter Madeline (Morgana Davies) in a fearsome temper about her father's plans to redevelop the family land in the Coorong – that unique strip of coastal wetland near the mouth of the Murray River in South Australia.
They need MIke’s signature to proceed. In flashback, he tells Madeline about growing up in the Coorong 60 years earlier.
Mike is both the boy (Finn Little, who steps into Greg Rowe's big shoes and is one of the strengths of this version) who raises a trio of orphaned pelicans while living in isolation with his withdrawn father Hideaway Tom (Jai Courtney), and the ageing man whose childhood memories challenge his current outlook.
The locations and use of some real pelicans provide a genuine foundation.