The film: 5 stars
Nicolas Roeg, the great unsung genius of British cinema, responsible for Don’t Look Now, The Man Who Fell to Earth and Performance, reached his apex here, on only his second film as director. Having directed Mick Jagger and James Fox in Performance – the kind of strung-out, paranoid psychodrama that could only have reached mainstream cinemas in the 1967-73 years – here he moved far away from Satanic Swinging London with an adaptation of an obscure novel by adventurer/writer Donald G. Payne, alias James Vance Marshall. Drawing on his skills as a cinematographer, Roeg creates a kaleidoscope of wilderness imagery around the incredibly simple story of two British children (Luc Roeg, and a pre-Railway Children Jenny Agutter), lost in the Australian Outback and trying to make their way to Darwin, encountering en route an Aborigine boy on his, well, walkabout. The struggles of communication, cultural difference, burgeoning sexuality, and the sheer brutality of survival are depicted with the stark objectivity of a documentarian, but the what makes the film so spectacular is the minute detail with which it captures various moments of nature, red in tooth and claw, all edited with the disorientating intensity that would become Roeg’s trademark. It is unsurprising that Roeg went on to shoot documentary footage for Glastonbury Fayre, and in another life he might easily have become a full-time documentarian; even then, though, it is unlikely he could have matched the striking imagery presented here.
Audio and visuals: 3 stars
Roeg, a cinematographer for Lean and Truffaut before becoming a director himself, captures some truly astonishing shots of the landscapes and life of the outback. The film has always been visually miraculous, but for high-definition, the image quality is perhaps less of an upgrade from previous releases as one might hope.
Presentation: 4 stars
A short excerpt of John Barry’s haunting score plays over a suitably dramatic landscape shot from the film, the same one used on the box art: simple, but effective.
Extras: 5 stars
For anyone wondering whether it’s worth upgrading from the previous, bare-bones Blu-Ray from HOLLYWOOD Classics, Second Sight have made it well worth it with the set of extras presented here. Luc Roeg, the son of the director and the actor playing “White Boy” in the film’s minimalist cast, seems to be the star, giving a commentary with critic David Thompson which strikes the balance all audio commentaries should strive for between academic discussion, anecdotes and trivia, and general good humour and camaraderie; giving a long and detailed interview entitled “Luc’s Walkabout”; and being featured alongside his co-star Jenny Agutter and his father in a BFI Q&A, filmed in 2011. Elsewhere, there is a lively interview with producer Si Litvinoff, uncreatively entitled “Producing Walkabout”; “Jenny and the Outback”, another excellent interview, this time with Agutter; “Remembering Roeg”, in which Danny Boyle discusses with some enthusiasm the “classic period” of Roeg, from 1971’s Walkabout to 1983’s Eureka, concluding that Roeg is the best British filmmaker, above David Lean, Michael Powell and even Boyle himself (Hitchcock goes strangely unmentioned). Finally, there is a short, archival (since the director passed away in 2018) introduction by Nicolas Roeg.
Overall: 5 stars
Second Sight have taken what was already a must-see film and turned it into a must-own.