Yes, Geoffrey is playing the grown-up version of Mike Kingsley… and that’s the only way the two stories are linked. Instead, he tells her about the South Australia of his childhood and his time with the pelicans and you’ve already zoned out reading this paragraph because this is obscenely boring isn’t it? It’s a dull, pointless addition that adds nothing.
The company is now run by his son Malcolm (Erik Thomson) whose daughter Madeline (Morgana Davies) is just distraught that her father could be planning to open a mine and wants her grandfather, Mike, to stop him. So the big difference between this and the other versions of the original book is that this one needed to give Geoffrey Rush something to do so it created a second storyline about a grown-up Mike who is the former head of a major company that’s taking a vote on a mining deal. They just had to add something that is not only pointless but actively weakens the film. If this was nothing but an hour and a half tale about a boy raising his pelican and learning to grow up, I’d enjoy it so much and probably be singing its praises but there’s a problem, and that problem is that the filmmakers couldn’t just stop when they had a good thing. It’s a lift on the classic “A boy and his x” narrative that has also given birth to things like ET or Iron Giant, it’s a classic trope that has worked forever and will continue to work until the end of cinema itself because we just love these stories of a young child and a companion trying to make it in the world. As time goes on, the pelicans grow bigger and bigger every day until they’re big enough that they can live on their own, except one who decides to stay with the young boy for a little bit longer. A young boy, Mike Kingley (Finn Little) finds three baby pelicans whose mother has been killed by hunters so he decides to try and raise them himself, with a little bit of help from his father, colloquially named Hideaway Tom (Jai Courtney) and a local Aboriginal man named Fingerbone Bill (Trevor Jamison). Storm Boy, the 2019 adaptation, is the same as the previous versions before it for the most part. That might be the greatest bit of information I’ve ever found… and it’s also probably the way they should’ve taken this remake because that might’ve been a little bit more interesting. According to my quick research, Colin Thiele’s only requirement was that his book couldn’t be turned into a sex comedy. Storm Boy is something of an Australian classic, getting an adaptation in 1976 that netted several awards and was a fairly big box office hit in Australia. In 1964, Colin Thiele wrote the book Storm Boy about the relationship between a boy and his pelican.
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