I was very wary when I heard there was going to be an adaptation for BSU as it is one of my favourite books and it was a real friend through a difficult time. But this is for the most part a fantastic adaptation, the casting is absolutely perfect, Simon Baker has never been better, the kids are sensational, the blending of genres was done remarkably well, magic realism is a tough thing to pull off!
I thought I might talk a bit about why a few people are not loving the time jump and why I think they may have missed a small step from the adaptation. I feel adaptations need to become their own thing and not be too stale, but I also feel sometimes adapters lose the importance of something in the book they may have missed.
For me the issue isn't with the time jump, it happens in the book so I think in a sense they had to follow it. For me what I feel could've been threaded through the whole thing is the importance of writing and Eli's gift for writing. Writing is his gift and is going to be his escape from this life surrounded by crime, a way through trauma.
We saw Eli write the letters to Alex Bermuda, his father surrounded by books, teachers mention he was very intelligent, but I felt they could've emphasised this further. Instead the focus was very much on relationships and getting his mum out of prison. But I feel there was always a self-determinism to Eli, to find a life for himself, not just save everyone else, and so when we jump to him being older, it feels like the plot lingers on his mother getting out of prison and the other machinations with Teddy, rather than his determination to become a writer and become a journalist. I felt in the book he wasn't going to the paper to become a writer just to necessarily to still work out the mysteries of the case it was to satisfy a longing in himself. I found the transition of young Eli to older Eli a bit strange with the dream sequence and coming out of the water and the sudden sexualisation of such an innocent character we've deeply loved. I felt the emerging in to manhood metaphor a bit laboured.
I felt what the adaptation could've done is follow more of Eli's efforts to become his own person, become a journalist and its less his desire to solve the past and it's like the past hasn't escaped him yet, he hasn't killed it off. Unfortunately for the me the weakest part of the book was the same here where Dalton went a little Hollywood at the end, with the clocktower sequence and the relationship with Caitlyn Spies, for all he had pushed away from it for the most part.
I felt one other difference for me from the book was the image of Tytus Broz. This could've been me and my projection but in the book I felt they played up a lot more of a sense of this almost pseudo mayor of Brisbane, the man of the people who everyone loved, but who was secretly pulling the puppet strings of everything. You could tell Broz was a crook from the start here. I wonder if they did this on purpose? That in some ways wanted to move away from that twist in the book because it may have seemed obvious on film? I guess for me what I might have liked to have seen is play up the almost Joh Bjelke-Petersen nature of that character (former Queensland premiere once loved found to be later quite corrupt), that even the people you think you can trust are no good. I felt in the book when Eli goes to meet Broz that's where it suddenly lands for him, he realises he had an intuition years ago, whereas here we play that Eli knows he's bad right from the start.
For all this being said I don't want to spoil the fact for the most part they did a brilliant job and like I said sometimes you need to shift emphasis in the adaptation to make it work for the screen which was in this circumstance the redemption of a family.
I thought I might talk a bit about why a few people are not loving the time jump and why I think they may have missed a small step from the adaptation. I feel adaptations need to become their own thing and not be too stale, but I also feel sometimes adapters lose the importance of something in the book they may have missed.
For me the issue isn't with the time jump, it happens in the book so I think in a sense they had to follow it. For me what I feel could've been threaded through the whole thing is the importance of writing and Eli's gift for writing. Writing is his gift and is going to be his escape from this life surrounded by crime, a way through trauma.
We saw Eli write the letters to Alex Bermuda, his father surrounded by books, teachers mention he was very intelligent, but I felt they could've emphasised this further. Instead the focus was very much on relationships and getting his mum out of prison. But I feel there was always a self-determinism to Eli, to find a life for himself, not just save everyone else, and so when we jump to him being older, it feels like the plot lingers on his mother getting out of prison and the other machinations with Teddy, rather than his determination to become a writer and become a journalist. I felt in the book he wasn't going to the paper to become a writer just to necessarily to still work out the mysteries of the case it was to satisfy a longing in himself. I found the transition of young Eli to older Eli a bit strange with the dream sequence and coming out of the water and the sudden sexualisation of such an innocent character we've deeply loved. I felt the emerging in to manhood metaphor a bit laboured.
I felt what the adaptation could've done is follow more of Eli's efforts to become his own person, become a journalist and its less his desire to solve the past and it's like the past hasn't escaped him yet, he hasn't killed it off. Unfortunately for the me the weakest part of the book was the same here where Dalton went a little Hollywood at the end, with the clocktower sequence and the relationship with Caitlyn Spies, for all he had pushed away from it for the most part.
I felt one other difference for me from the book was the image of Tytus Broz. This could've been me and my projection but in the book I felt they played up a lot more of a sense of this almost pseudo mayor of Brisbane, the man of the people who everyone loved, but who was secretly pulling the puppet strings of everything. You could tell Broz was a crook from the start here. I wonder if they did this on purpose? That in some ways wanted to move away from that twist in the book because it may have seemed obvious on film? I guess for me what I might have liked to have seen is play up the almost Joh Bjelke-Petersen nature of that character (former Queensland premiere once loved found to be later quite corrupt), that even the people you think you can trust are no good. I felt in the book when Eli goes to meet Broz that's where it suddenly lands for him, he realises he had an intuition years ago, whereas here we play that Eli knows he's bad right from the start.
For all this being said I don't want to spoil the fact for the most part they did a brilliant job and like I said sometimes you need to shift emphasis in the adaptation to make it work for the screen which was in this circumstance the redemption of a family.
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