[Movie Review] AUSTRALIA
I’ve always normally been pretty hot on being able to give very accurate office predictions (I was the guy, after all, who was spot on in predicting the opening gross for the opening weekend of The Dark Knight on this very site) and in suggesting which “acclaim-seeking” films will lift off and which ones will flounder (I take you back to our Filmrot days when I was one of the first to suggest that Cold Mountain would not work under Jude Law’s lead after Tom Cruise dropped out).
With all that in mind, if you’d presented me with the poster art, trailers and plot synopsises for Baz Luhrmann’s Australia and, say, Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler and asked me which one would sweep up the critical acclaim AND the hearts and minds of the early ‘awards season’ movie-going audience, then I’d have pointed at The Wrestler and suggested that Mickey Rourke banging on about this “Rocky wannabe” being his ‘come-back vehicle’ (wasn’t that meant to be Sin City or something?), had absolutely no chance whatsoever against the might of Luhrmann doing a big, grand, patriotic “old school” epic.
The Wrestler could be the best movie of the year (many suggest it is!) but at that particular time of year, audiences tend to look for a “certain type” of motion picture and Australia almost had a “certain type” cheat sheet and was ticking off all the required boxes needed to ensnare an audience. It was my honest opinion that nothing should have got in the way of Australia. And I was wrong. Australia sank at the US, was rejected in its home country (and how bad must it be when a film called Australia about Australia can’t find an audience in Australia) although many suggest that reports of the film’s failure in Oz are a little exaggerated, and arrives here in the UK almost a lame-duck, as queues go round the block for Adam Sandler’s Bedtime Stories but no one wants to travel to Oz with Baz Luhrmann.
First and foremost, this film does indeed make sure that those aforementioned audience-enticing boxes are all ticked off and sufficiently covered – there’s action, humour, drama, romance, grand locales, etc. etc. BUT that’s all there is. The token requirments are all present and correct, but there’s nothing there holding it all up or together. For Baz Luhrmann to say he is aiming for a “modern day Gone With The Wind” with his screenplay is like saying you want to rebuild the World Trade Centres with jelly as your foundations and pipe-cleaners as your girders:
In northern Australia at the beginning of World War II, an English aristocrat (Nicole Kidman) inherits a cattle station the size of Maryland. When English cattle barons plot to take her land, she reluctantly joins forces with a rough-hewn stock-man (Hugh Jackman) to drive 2,000 head of cattle across hundreds of miles of the country’s most unforgiving land, only to still face the bombing of Darwin, Australia, by the Japanese forces that had attacked Pearl Harbor only months earlier.
I’m not going to savage Australia though, despite the fact that it is an insanely over-cooked and over-blown wannabe working off of a severely under-developed screenplay. This may well be a solid two hour movie stuck within the confines of a bloated 165 minute running time, but it is testatment to Luhrmann and his cast that for all its flaws (and such flaws are plentiful) that the film still works as a big, robust piece of dispensible entertainment.
Hugh Jackman proves once and for all that he is a true, modern, great leading man in league with the George Clooneys and Brad Pitts of the movie making world. More so because he is doing great work with a shoddy script and a half-written role that is nothing but stock cliche.
Nicole Kidman is absolutely grating from start to finish and she struggles from start to finish, so we struggle to engage with her as a result. Has any other A-list actress (not associated with Frank Miller’s The Spirit) clunked so severely within the first ten to twenty seconds of appearing, in character, on screen as badly as what Kidman does here? Her problem is that her character is required to bounce around and cover all bases – villainous, ignorant, loveable, romantic, distressed in need of rescuing, heroic, motherly, independent and so on and so on – when, yes that age old criticism again, there’s no well-thought out screenplay and structure to support her doing so. Kidman’s skill as an actress, and she is a skilled actress, means that we don’t abandon her in her attempts with ease despite the fact that the running time is so obnoxiously indulgent that it forces us to AND she’s pretty much irritating and cliched from the get-go!
The two, Kidman and Jackman, do have a great chemistry together and it would interest me to see the two of them together in a modern thriller, romance or action movie because they work well together and do what they can with what they’ve got. The thing is Australia spends so long trying to be the “modern Gone With The Wind” or a new “grand epic” that it forgets to cover all the basic elements that would make it a coherent movie first and foremost.
The opening moments of the movie with the high camp performances, the overly-written narration, the stylised direction and the cartoon on-screen geography, sets a tone that is completely inconsistent with the rest of the movie. Luhrmann brings us in on a stylised, foppish note more in keeping with Moulin Rouge but then tries to sell us on big emotional drama that he is asking us to care about and get invested in and we can’t. The reason we can’t is because no matter how entertaining the film is, and it is very watchable I’ll give it that, you cannot shake the feeling that Australia is less an actual movie and more like one of those ridiculously over-indulgent costume dramas you see getting spoofed whenever you see a movie about the making of a movie.
It’s staggering to see such offensively mediocre greenscreen back projection on show in some scenes, more so when we are all, through months and months of interviews and news articles telling us so, that the movie was actually shot out on location in the outbacks of Australia. So why the back projection? And if it was as a result of reshoots then couldn’t Luhrmann have aimed for the highest possible standard to match up with the absolutely gorgeous location photography he’d captured for the rest of the movie?
On top of that, and going back to the movie’s insane 165 minute running time, Australia is just so damn cluttered; cluttered to the extent that it has so much of everything in there that no one thing gets the attention and texture that it deserves. And when you’re talking about touching on… deep breath… a country building its own heritage on callous racism that would rival the USA’s history of slavery, the aboriginal culture, the ‘stolen generations’, the bombing of Darwin during World War II… well, you better make sure that attention to detail and texture is what you’ve got an abundance of in order to avoid accusations of stereotyping, casual racism and ignorance.
It’s frustrating that there’s a natural, worthy conclusion staring the audience in the face (right down to the pull-out shot!) but then it goes on to add another forty to fifty minutes detailing the bombing of Darwin Harbour in rushed, trite detail. Not to mention more endings on top of that sequence, in an attempt to unsurp the title for “Most Unnecessary Amount Of Endings” from Lord of the Rings: Return of the King. Luhrmann’s Australia has a decent enough romance to tell about two opposing characters bonding over a cattle-drive. If he shaped his film around that concept, and ONLY that concept, then he’d have something great. Perhaps if he’d have the balls he could release a “cut” on DVD with the entire ‘fourth act’ removed.
All labels thrown in the direction of Luhrmann’s movie. The director unfortunately seems to follow the shallow opinion that the term “epic” isn’t just about the look, feel and tone of the piece but it has to have a running time to match the definition too. We have James Cameron to thank for this, but it is most definitely not true! If you want to know about the ‘stolen generation’ then you cannot do better then Philip Noyce’s absolutely fantastic Rabbit Proof Fence, and if you want a big modern interpretation of the old school Hollywood epic then I’ll point you in the direction of Frank Darabont’s The Green Mile or actually-far-more-brilliant-then-anyone-gives-it-credit-for The Notebook.
With a large pair of scissors in the editing room and a cold stark set of eyes, this film could be ripped into and something quite possibly excellent could emerge. What’s left instead is a bloated piece of clutter that works as nothing more then a good, solid piece of throw-away entertainment. Nothing more.
15 Responses to “[Movie Review] AUSTRALIA”
hey great review gazz!
really, nice review. i loved the movie and seriously thought you wouldnt like it (i dont know why, maybe it was because i was the only one that liked it, my friends hated it)
i can tell you didn’t REALLY like it (am i wrong? although you gave it 4 popcorns i feel you didnt really enjoy it) but i found it to be good
and so far nichole kidman has looked gorgeous in all her movies (its okay gwyneth i still love you, youre my #1)
the only time i truly hated hugh jackman was in that deception movie. his actign in the movie was good but i just hated the character with a passion
I give it THREE AND A HALF mate but no, I wouldn’t say I “LOVED” it. I honestly thought it was a good bit of entertainment, but not a “great” movie!
lmfao! my bad
lololol
i just noticed that wasnt a whole popcorn lmao
its hard to tell, but its funny
its like a bite mark it should just be split down the middle lol
xD
I’m glad you at least enjoyed the thing.
And I am racing to see some more movies before the deadline for my top 25 list. I’m trying to see Changeling, Gran Torino, and Slumdog Millionaire. Milk, Doubt, and The Wrestler don’t open in my area until after the deadline.
Oh wait, I actually can see all of the aforementioned films save for Doubt before my deadline! I’m really going to try to watch those plus Ben Button and Frost/Nixon, since my list right now does not come to 25. I’m a few short
I don’t want to put stuff on my top 25 that I hated or was meh toward.
25? i thought it was 5…..
Hazzy, I have to compile a seperate top 25 list as well as the other categories.
“have” to! LOL! You make it sound like your life depends on it lass!
I’ve been pretty methodical this year, working on it as I’ve went along the months so it was pretty fully formed by the time that I came to write it up!
I’m really glad you’re going to make the effort to hunt out the “big hitters” that don’t break in the UK till the early part of 09. I got SO MANY complaints regarding my list last year, and my inclusion of films via screener that didn’t have an actual UK release that year, that I’ve decided to stick to an entirely UK release date based list and let it be a counter-representation to yours!
So it should be interesting when we put ours side by side with each other!
I have a ranked list written out right now of the ones I have watched, so when I watch the other films I can just put them in accordingly.
I’m looking forward to it! I think our Top 2 are identical films in not necessarily the same order!
Actually the movie AUSTRALIA is doing incredibly well at the box-office in Australia the country. It is just about to overtake Quantum of Solice in the gross taking “stakes” and is still showing to full houses in many cinemas, even after six weeks. Where did you get the information that it wasn’t doing well here ??
Brett – Melbourne
I based this information, at the time of writing the review, from a website for an Australian new website called ninemsn.com.au which ran an article stating that Quantum of Solace opened to a first day double ($2 million)of what Australia had made ($1.1 million) and further stated that Australian audiences were not embracing the flick.
I included this as fact in my review, but further to your comments I’ve done some further research and realised that my comments were made regarding a BAD first day for Australia in ONE Australian city and it’s not reflective of the film’s OVERALL business outside of the opening weekend.
So I stand corrected, thank you
Hey thanks for replying,
The media here in Aus is very political in some respects, with papers in opposition to Murdoch(Fox)very quick to trumpet bad news about anything turned out by their competitors.
I can’t help noticing that AUSTRALIA has just opened very strongly in France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Denmark and has even done okay in the UK- notwithstanding Germaine Greer getting stuck into it !
Brett – Melbourne
I was very tempted to watch this, but it gave the ribe that it was very romantic? If so then I wouldn’t like it.
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