Australia [Blu-ray] [2008]

Hugh Jackman kills it in this movie. The setting and time period are a great backdrop, and all the actors give a solid performance. My only gripe is that the leading actress (I cannot recall her name for the life of me) is just flat out irritating. Not irritating in the intended way of developing from irritating to heroic, but just straight obnoxious throughout. She comes across as cringy and forced throughout. Still, Hugh's performance makes up for it.

I really liked the movie. It was a bit of a slow start but picked up. It kept my attention from the beginning. Funny Romantic and Adventurous plot with several twists. I’m a softee so of course I shed a few tears.

Australia is the followup to Moulin Rouge but bigger antecedecents lie behind it, Gone with the Wind, Titanic, Doctor Zhivago, Reds, big pictures told on a national scale. In fact I wonder what Australians make of Australia, which seems to involve just one patch of the continent (the Northern Territory), when you would think it would be possible to involve all the Australian states? Anyhow the story is pretty vast as is, and basically it's held together by a pretty tough racialized storyline involving the "stolen generations," aboriginal children claimed by the state and brought up in orphanages away from their families.The story is told largely from the point of view of Nullah, son of an Aboriginal mother and a white dad, and therefore left feeling that he belongs nowhere. Watched over from afar by his grandfather, little Nullah has a vague, pagan sense of cause and effect; for an American speaker his imagery of singing and fate and a violent liberty seems intoxicatingly difficult and offkilter, and maybe this soupcon of the unknown (even the "exotic" if you will) gives the otherwise stock romantic plot between Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman a new dimension. After all, one can no longer believe that the romantic trials of a drover and an aristocratic Mrs. Boss should take central stage when so much else is going on in the world--so much injustice and so much bigoted cruelty.Kidman's character arc as Lady Sarah Ashley is like something out of an 80s'Goldie Hawn movie--pampered princess learns about life as it's lived in the dirt--but I suppose it was Scarlett O'Hara's too, tearing into the earth for a single turnip and swearing never to go hungry again. Meanwhile a parade of Australia's top actors, including Jack Thompson, Bryan Brown, David Wenham, and even David Gulpilil (from Walkabout, The Last Wave, Rabbit-Proof Fence and Crocodile Dundee) take minor and major roles, so the movie also has some of the fun factor of George Stevens' Greatest Story Ever Told, with John Wayne as the Centurion. There isn't one thing about Australia I didn't love--except for the horrid Elton John song that plays over the final credits. Why, Baz, why, was this some secret gay tradeoff? Outside of that gaffe, I spent the last hour and a half of the movie in tears, it was like the heavens opened and rained on my face, and I can barely remember a time when I did not live in Darwin and squadrons of highly trained Japanese pilots were not pouring down colorful bombs and destroying every evil person in town and breaking the prisons wide open.There weren't too many people in the theater when I saw Australia and I hope this isn't a sign of the movie not doing well. It has had some totally unfair reviews. Then I recall that the third, fourth, sixth, seventh and eighth times I saw Moulin Rouge the theater wasn't all that packed either.Those reviews made me think, going in, that I wouldn't be enjoying the film, and I can report that this was not the case. It was fantastic and beautiful and wonderfully done. OK, it's not for everyone. But for me, it was the movie of the year and I only wish that Elton had just said, no thanks Baz Luhrmann.

I love Howard Hawks' films...Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, Red River, and Rio Bravo are amazing pieces of entertainment. As I was watching Australia, the new Baz Luhrmann movie with Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman, I kept thinking...man, Baz must really love Hawks' movies, too.As evidenced by the films above, the mismatched couple who fight and fight until they realize they're perfect for each other (see Much Ado About Nothing, Taming of the Shrew, and Moonlighting as other examples of the form) and the group of underestimated misfits who come together to fight evil are two big elements used again and again by Hawks. Throw in a bit of John Ford's The Searchers and its hard look at racism leading to inhuman deeds and mix well and you have...Australia.The problem modern audiences may have with Luhrmann's new movie is it's very, very earnest. This is straight ahead epic storytelling with its heart on its sleeve and hat and boots with never a wink to the crowd in the theater to say "ain't these people quaint". You either buy in or you don't. If you do, like I did, you're in for a hell of a ride.This, I feel, is the flip-side to The Dark Knight. Good and evil are trapped in something akin to a battle and an embrace in Nolan's Gotham City. You root for Batman, but he does stuff that is on the wrong side of freedom and civil rights. The Joker is pure crazy, but he's the most mesmerizing character in the film. In Australia, there are good guys and bad guys and you are either really good or twirl your mustache evil. The main villain actually may be a bit too two-dimensional in that aspect, but it didn't hurt my overall enjoyment.Why? Well, epic melodrama is hard to pull off...I'm talking about the real stuff here. The recent BBC production of Bleak House is a great example. There are very good and very, very bad people in that story, but the acting is so fantastic you rarely if ever catch yourself rolling your eyes (like whenever I've watched Smallville...see: bad epic melodrama). Kidman and Jackman sell their characters...the displaced Englishwoman and the rough-hewn "Drover". They are thrown together just to, initially it seems, thwart a nasty cattle baron from monopolizing the beef industry in the country. But the other big story, the main one in fact, centers around Australia's "lost generation". These were Aboriginal children who were fathered by white men who didn't claim them. They were taken by the government, the mothers had no rights, and handed over to the church to be taught to "act white" and then work in the servant class. Nullah, played by the fantastic child actor Brandon Walters, is one of these "creamies" who has been hidden on the ranch now owned by Lady Sarah Ashley (Kidman). Lady Ashley discovers what is going on, is horrified by the law, and works to keep him hidden as well. Why the Drover cares so much about Nullah becomes clear later in the film (no, it's not what you think...that would be too easy) and Jackman's experience with stage and musical work does him proud here. He can do earnest better than almost any actor alive when he needs to and his later use of the f-word (the only curse I can remember from the entire film) hits so hard, in just the right emotional moment, that it kills. Russell Crowe was originally cast as the Drover but backed out. If Crowe had done the film, and I have liked him in other things...the Napoleon-era British navy film that I can't remember the name of right now, it would not have worked. Crowe never loses that bit of edge and the Drover, at one point, really has to fully break down and become completely vulnerable. Jackman shines at that point.Anyway...a warning, the movie is long 2 hours and 40something minutes, but I didn't realize that until I had left the theater. I saw it alone...I was out of town at a pediatrics meeting...and that's a good thing. I didn't have to hide from Holly the few times the movie hit me a bit too hard and do that cough-throat clearing thing we dudes do to cover up a stray tear.

Great cinematography. Exciting adventure story. Good acting.

If you are expecting a great rolling epic where the country is one of the stars of the show, this is not that film! Is it a romcom, a drama, a farce, a romance, a comedy, a war film - well that would be hard to say because it's a bit of all those!In the beginning the Nicole Kidman figure is a caricature of an English aristocrat, like a character from 'Those magnificent men and their flying machines.' The Hugh Jackman figure is a bar room brawler - a side of him that we don't see again in the film.The film is very disjointed and even appears to have reached its conclusion at one point when in fact it's only half way through! The whole atmosphere and most of the characterisations change quite substantially after a desert crossing! Most notably the Nicole Kidman figure: she changes so completely as to be another person altogether.The archetypal bad guy remains a bit of farcical figure throughout the film. The mixed-race child is as near to the star of the film as anyone gets.The senior aboriginal seems to possess other-worldly powers that bring a surreal element into the film that could be seen to be a bit too convenient! Of the other characters, the accountant is the incompetent drunk who comes good; the cattle baron, well he's just the megalomaniac cattle baron; the aboriginal friend of the Drover is the typical native friend of a main character. As for the rest . . .This is a mish-mash of a film with little to really commend it. It's not unpleasant or unwatchable, it's just confused.

Clearly drawing its inspiration from forerunners like The Overlanders, The Sundowners and We of the Never Never, Baz Luhrmann's Australia desperately wants to be the great Australian epic but has to settle for a fairly decent cattle drive epic-cum-wartime romantic drama that could have been much better. All of the clichés are present and correct, from the outsider coming under the spell of the land while Waltzing Matilda and Somewhere Over the Rainbow weave in and out of the soundtrack to the obligatory Aboriginal magic coming to the rescue, but they're never quite as much fun as the films it aspires to.Part of the problem is the many caricatured and mannered performances, with Nicole Kidman overplaying the stage faux-English stuffiness as the impatient aristocrat who arrives at her husbands cattle station to find herself a widow, her murderous racist foreman (David Wenham) plotting against her to ensure Bryan Brown's cattle king retains his monopoly and her only hope to avoid ruin to assemble a ragtag band to drive her cattle to Darwin with Hugh Jackman's drover, with the sneering Wenham in hot pursuit every step of the way. While Kidman gradually improves and becomes less cartoonish as the drive goes on, some characters never really gel, most notably Jack Thompson's alcoholic accountant, who seems introduced as the film's equivalent of Peter Ustinov's dryly comical Captain in The Sundowners but never really has anything to work with. But just as problematic are the gratuitous and often clumsily executed special effects for even basic shots of characters riding in front of landscapes or camping in the outback, which integrate the elements so poorly that they manage to look far worse than any 40s back projection. They're so naggingly unconvincing that they take you out of the movie, never more so than in the big stampede sequence that should be a highlight but too often looks like they didn't have enough time to quite finish the effects. The film did run into budget and bad weather problems, it's true, but so have other films that didn't look quite so sporadically artificial. It's almost as if it's been so long since anyone made a cattle drive picture on location that the old skills have been lost and scenes that could and should have been easily shot on location have been hurriedly shot in front of studio green screens instead, giving parts of the film a horribly artificial flat TV look that belies the film's huge budget.For a film that places so much emphasis on the importance of living a story, Luhrmann at times loses control of his sprawling material as his attention and focus seem to wander. It aims to be a sweeping old-fashioned saga but too often feels disjointed, like parts of different movies strung tenuously together and all too-often stopping just as they threaten to get interesting. The cattle drive ends abruptly, one major character's death is shown almost as an afterthought and a delirious desert crossing that David Lean would have been able to do in his sleep becomes a rather hurried and undeveloped montage that doesn't even seem to be happening to the film's main characters, who simply disappear from the scene. At times it threatens to turn into a three hour version of one of those work-in-progress presentations film companies put on for buyers and exhibitors, linking nearly-completed set pieces with trailers and promo reels to give an impression of what the finished film will be like. It even retains much of what was probably the temp track of classic Bernard Herrmann scores.If the viewer's attention sometimes wanders as much as the directors, there's certainly ambition here, attempting to make an old-fashioned period romantic adventure for a modern age that celebrates the country without whitewashing its past, particularly the invidious attempt to `breed the black out' of a stolen generation of Aboriginal or half-caste children that drives the latter section of the film. And, though most are just throwaway roles, there's plenty of familiar faces from classic Australian movies like Gulpilil, Bill Hunter, Bruce Spence, John Jarrett and Ray Barrett along the way, though the standout performance is easily Brendan Walters as the `creamy' Kidman tries to adopt and becomes a bargaining chip in Wenham's schemes. On the plus side, the director abandons the excessive over-editing of his previous collaboration with Kidman, Moulin Rouge, for something that has a lot more room to breathe and thankfully seems to be inspired by classic movies rather than MTV. And the film finally does come together in the aftermath of the bombing of Darwin (itself surprisingly brief and showing budget limitations in cutting and pasting some stock footage from Tora! Tora! Tora! over new effects). It's a shame the rest of the film couldn't be as effective.The extras on the DVD release are truly pitiful - two brief deleted scenes running less than three minutes combined - with the good stuff reserved for the Blu-ray release, which also includes 10 featurettes totalling 77 minutes.

I love this film, I watched once a long time ago but couldn't remember it. I saw it was available to purchase on a streaming service but to buy the dvd on here wasn't much more expensive so it was a better deal. The first part of the film looks a bit shoddy and you have to bear with it, it does improve. It's an emotional film so get tissues at the ready. I loved the film, the cast and the special features are brilliant! I will definitely be watching it again!

Sat down to watch this on a Friday night and I can honestly say it is the worst film I have ever seen, there is nothing to recommend it! The plot is dire, acting dreadful. We've just returned from a month in Australia and was looking forward to the desert scenery - but most of it looked fake. I very rarely review films but just felt I should warn the wider public! Nicole what were you thinking?

Again, bought as a gift. Can't believe there are people out there who have not seen this movie. It is fantastic (and it has Hugh Jackman in it).Epic tale of how the mixed race aborigine children were discriminated against in the time of world war two and during the bombing of Darwin. Its is also love story between an unlikely couple, uptight English 'lady', recently widowed Nicole Kidman, and outback loving Australian 'drover' Hugh Jackman. Definitely recommend.