The publicity blurb for the film reads:"This thrilling,bold adaptation charts the rise and fall of Australia’s original Mad Max;a coming of age tale about a defiant rebel sworn to wreak vengeance and havoc on the British Empire. Set against the badlands of colonial Australia where the English rule with a bloody fist and the Irish endure,Ned Kelly (George MacKay) discovers he comes from a line of Irish rebels called the Sons of Sieve,an uncompromising army of cross-dressing bandits immortalised for terrorising their oppressors back in Ireland.
"Nurtured by the notorious bushranger Harry Power (Russell Crowe) and fuelled by the unfair arrest of his mother,Ned Kelly recruits a wild bunch of warriors to plot one of the most audacious attacks of anarchy and rebellion the country has ever seen."
Well,there you have it. Ned the Aussie rebel hero with a background connection with imaginary cross-dressing Irish bandits,plotting with his wild bunch of warriors to bring down the evil British Empire.
Anarchy and rebellion celebrated by Kurzel and Carey where there was none. Literary imagination and movie fantasy combined to tell a make-believe story unrecognisable to Kelly and his contemporaries.
The literary rubric of Carey’s book and Kurzel’s movie is don’t let the truth or anything resembling the truth get in the way of eccentric storytelling.
There was nothing unfair,as the blurb suggests,concerning Ned’s mother's arrest for her part in attacking policeman Alexander Fitzpatrick.
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She whacked poor old Fitz over the head with a fire shovel,knocking him unconscious,as Ned fired his revolver and wounded the policeman in the wrist. There was nothing revolutionary or even remotely heroic in the career criminal’s ghastly Glenrowan plan to wreck a train and murder its passengers including two women.