“Australia” Review

Baz Luhrmann’s “Australia” could’ve been a good movie. Thats the biggest flaw in a film full of them. Luhrmann knows how to work a camera, thats damn sure. “Australia” features some beautiful shots of cinematography. What Luhrmann obviously doesn’t comprehend is everything else about filmmaking, including but not limited to: Pacing, Character Development, Dialogue, Suspension of Disbelief and most egregious of all how to make an audience care about whats happening on screen.



“Australia” is a passion project, clearly designed to be an outback “Gone With the Wind”. It is also a film with few redeeming qualities. It is hard for me as a reviewer to decide where I should begin to list the things wrong with this cinematic disaster. Here is a film that is so bad its initially funny, but eventually it spirals the viewer into irritation and apathy.



I shall start with one good thing about the film, so as not to seem to negative. There is one truly funny moment in the beginning when Nicole Kidman’s Lady Ashley and Hugh Jackman’s Drover are driving in the outback and come across a pack of Kangaroos (Is pack correct? Flock, Gaggle, Pride? Who knows). Kidman immediately fawns over the beautiful creatures and the result is laugh out loud hilarious.



It is telling that the only positive I can find in this film is a 45 second moment. It is now time to proceed to list the many things wrong with “Australia”.





1. Relatable and Interesting Characters. One key to making an effective film is to invest the viewer in the onscreen action. This is done through character development, giving them a background that is identifiable and thus makes their growth as human beings gratifying. Baz Luhrmann has given us characters that instead of piquing interest, serve to annoy and anger. There were multiple occasions in this film where if I could, I literally would have reached into the TV screen and punched a character in the head. This sounds like hyperbole, but its not. Nicole Kidman is insufferably irritating, and all attempts to make her a plucky hero or love interest fail miserably under the weight of her awful performance. Hugh Jackman plays a drover named… Drover. That’s enough information right there to tell how bad that character is.



There are two major death scenes in the film, both of which receive elongated attention and melodramatic reactions. These come off as comical and stupid since neither character is remotely appreciated by the viewer, in fact one is hardly developed at all. The other character is a two dimensional stereotype that is apparently supposed to be a fully formed mentor figure. Continuing the two dimensional motif, we get: Irritating Aboriginal stereotypes who naturally can do no wrong, as atonement for the evil white man’s sins against them, Simple villains who only exist to explain their motives and drive the plot, an old man who exclaims observations that are straight out of a parody of a similar film (“Why, who is that? Its… Lady Ashley! Looks like we’ve got a little competition now!” Gag.), a chinese stereotype, the supportive army captain who serves only to believe in others and more.



The worst of the character sins is the character Nullah, a young Aboriginal boy who is one of the most obnoxiously precocious and annoying characters ever set to celluloid. The child actor playing him is a poster child for why children who aren’t named Haley Joel Osmet or Jodie Foster should never ever act before the age of 13. This kid will truly enrage you, especially when he’s supposed to be charming and special. It doesn’t help that he’s the films narrator. By the end of the film I was seriously hoping that this little boy would die.



2. Dialogue. Not one line feels natural. Every single word seems as if its been pulled from a parody of a Michael Bay adaptation of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Pretentious and stilted, the heavy Australian accents mixed with some truly laughable acting, especially from the Aborigines (who apparently not one of has ever taken a drama class) make the dialogue somehow worse.



3. Pillaging a Classic. “The Wizard of Oz” is referenced time and time again in this film. What is Luhrmann trying to do here? Convince me that this film is good by reminding me what quality cinema actually is? What he actually does is make me wish I was watching that film instead. He also refuses to stop playing Somewhere Over the Rainbow. He rapes “The Wizard of Oz” until I actually despised seeing his repeated references to it.



4. Believability and Reality. Do I believe that there is really this much evil scheming and violence all over 1500 head of cattle to be sold to the Australian army for soldier’s beef rations? Is that a serious question? It’s ludicrous. First of all, if the evil cattle company had a real monopoly then the small underdog Faraway Downs wouldn’t be a threat, and even if they couldn’t match prices the army would need more than 1500 hamburgers to supply the entirety of their forces for all of WWII. Secondly, the fact that all of Australia seems to be so invested in the cattle trade that they would whoop and holler when the cattle arrive simply tells you how sad life in Australia must be.



Another huge hole in logic aside from, well, the entire plot, is that apparently magic exists. Yes the little boy Nullah manages to stop a cattle stampede with his mind. If only they could have trampled the brat into a bloody pulp and forced him off the cliff… but no instead we learn about Aboriginal magic. I frankly think that this film is an insult to Aborigines. Instead of making them seem like real people it turns them into ignorant witch doctors and mami’s. It does to them what “Gone With the Wind” did to blacks, except this is worse since Luhrmann is actually TRYING to portray them positively.



5. Pacing. This film is too long. Period. The scenes that seem interesting, the ones we’d like to see more of are brushed by too quickly. The ones that are painful and that should end abruptly instead drag out way beyond their necessary end point.



6. Nicole Kidman’s Forehead. It keeps growing bigger every day.



7. Australian Accents. I don’t really mind Australian Accents usually. We have family friends from the continent. Films like “Crocodile Dundee” feature a heavy accent, yet its offset by other accents as well. The accents in “Australia” are so heavy and strong that it will literally drive you, the viewer insane. Hugh Jackman’s bearable, I suppose, but David Wenham, an actor I actually like, has an accent that grates one’s ears like sandpaper. Every time he said the word “power” (I count at least 5 instances) it made me cringe. The only accents to offset these Aussies, are Kidman’s terrible British inflections and aboriginal accents which are somehow more irritating than any other accent on earth. Imagine a film starring Jim Varney, Larry the Cable Guy and Sam Elliot. Now multiply that pain by tenfold.



8. Use of Blackface. Seriously, I kid you not, there is blackface in this film. The one aborigine woman who is supposed to be attractive is a white woman in black face. If that’s not insulting to a people that you’re supposedly championing I don’t know what is.



9. Bad CGI. Do those look like real cows? No. Do those background look like they are there? No. Do those planes look real? No. Should a film that cost more than three times as much as “District 9” look three times worse? No.

10. Pointless Subtitles. Please explain why random sentences that are spoken in plain fucking English are subtitled in this film. Was that easier than doing another take where Luhrmann asked the actors to actually enunciate?



I’m going to stop here because I’m tired and don’t feel like nitpicking. This is a film with an endless amount of things wrong with it, and frankly it may be one of the most laughably misdirected efforts ever. Every single idea it has backfires completely. It’s fitting that the last shot of the film is of a man’s ass. One walks out of the film loathing the characters, feeling aggravated and infuriated. This is a movie on par with the Robert Redford starring “Great Gatsby”, a film that devalues its medium, and tarnishes an art form, a country, a race, and an entire continent.

0.5 out of 5 stars