Walkabout (1971)

The 1971 film Walkabout is based in Australia in present time. The majority of the film takes place in the Australian outback and the film clearly depicts the beautiful but deceiving landscape. This setting creates a very harsh atmosphere; this atmosphere was exemplified with the eerie soundtrack which used very sudden and unnerving sounds for example the movement of a lizard would be uncomfortably loud and uneasy for the audience. The storyline of the film was quite hard for one to understand and you really had to focus to every detail to just about understand. I think that the film was made to have this affect in order to make it differ from other films and the unnerving sounds and angles made the audience very uncomfortable which is exactly how the boy and girl would have felt being alone in the outback. The camera angles, just like the sounds where very sudden and uneasy and where very sharp this also helped to bring across what I feel is the plan behind the film. The main characters that featured in the film where a young boy and a teenage girl, who were presented as brother and sister, but we are not told this nor are we told what their names are. This is a very good technique as it makes members of the audience ask more questions and drag them into the film whether they understand it or not. In my opinion the film was very random in all aspects and the ending is a very hard situation to grasp but what I feel is the deeper message is to present the beauty of humans and how we interact with each other and the beauty of our surroundings.