Railway Children

Several readers of this website are currently in the US, so it’s probably best to use the American title for this film, released over the weekend in the States. That’s because Railway Children is a stealth sequel of sorts to the 1970’s film, still a staple of UK TV bank-holiday programming even if it’s hardly known over the pond. Released as The Railway Children Return in the UK, Morgan Matthews’ family adventure failed to summon or surf much of a wave of nostalgia back home, but it’s probably worth looking at it with fresh eyes and assessing it as a stand-alone feature in terms of a future shelf-life.

UK national treasure Jenny Agutter returns as Roberta Waterbury, aka Bobby, a teenage girl in the first film, now a grandmother seeking to protect her flock during the dark days of WWII. Bobby’s daughter Annie (Sheridan Smith) has her own son, but with Annie’s husband posted missing at the war, there’s space to take in some evacuees, and Bobby and Annie find space for the little tykes, in a reprise of the first film’s dynamic. What’s new here is a new emphasis on race; before you can say Whistle Down The Wind, the kids find a mysterious stranger sleeping in a disused railway car, who proves to be a black GI child soldier Abe (KJ Aikens) who has deserted his unit due to racist violence. Tom Courtney and ‘megastructure” expert David Bradley round out the cast.

This new woke direction seems to have greatly upset fans of the original E Nesbitt text based on their online complaints, but in truth, Railway Children probably needed an update; the kind of goody-two- shoes japes of the original would hardly fly today. But the details remains stubbornly problematic; the nostalgic tone means that Danny Brocklehust’s script, co-written with producer Jemma Rodgers, is at lengths to make villains of the US military police, and absolves all the English characters of any racial bias whatsoever. The UK, like most countries, still have obvious issues with race, so a clean report card in the 1940’s seems like a whitewash sop for kids only.

However the title goes, Railway Children largely fails because of British cinema’s endless regurgitation of nostalgia for the past in the forlorn hope of forming national identity in a post-Brexit world; there’s no wave to surf right now. From The Aftermath to Their Finest, the list of unpopular texts stretch back some ten years now, and Chris Nolan’s Dunkirk is the only one to land. Nostalgia for a past that never existed can work, and although it’s nice to see Agutter reprise her iconic role, everything about this smacks of worthy Sunday evening television. Despite good intentions, somewhere along the line, Railway Children hits the buffers.