I've just seen Australia!

J

Jesss

New member
how good was that film?? anyone? thoughts?
i'm new to this stuff so sorry if there's already been a thread posted haha! :D
 
I'm a first time poster in the Movies forum, as I'm not a film buff, but this thread title caught my eye on the main page! :)

Although as I say I'm not a great film person, I'd love to see 'Australia' as I'm obsessed with Australia the country after a trip there last year!

But the dodgy reviews have put me off somewhat - OP you're praise of it might make me decide to go and see it.

I'll see what others think too.
 
Good! It's a great film, me and my friend really enjoyed it :)
It's kind of divided into 2 films; First half is very jokey and introducing the romance of Jackman and Kidman, then the second half is more to do the war! deffoz 5 star for me :D
 
Have just come back from seeing "Australia", in a rather empty cinema. I was quite looking forward to letting it wash over me in an epic sort of way, while perving at Hugh Jackman and hoping he got his shirt off a lot.

Oh my god, it is seriously cheesy! Somewhere inside this huge, long, lets-throw-in-a-dash-of-everything movie there is a good film struggling to get out.

Good bits:
- The use of real Australian scenery, stunning lanRABcapes!
- Hugh Jackman..drool...
- Nicole Kidman is always watchable, though I can't understand why they would hire an Australian actress to play an Englishwoman in what's supposed to be The Great Australian Movie.
- The child actor playing Nullah was extraordinarily good, and I say that as someone who loathes child actors with a passion.

Not so good bits:
- The music is terrible. A mish mash of vaguely familiar bits nicked from other films, when they could have had a beautiful soundtrack and could have incorporated Aboriginal music. The strident use of Elgar's Nimrod at the end was astoundingly inappropriate and distracting.
- The far too obvious use of CGI, especially the views of the ships in Darwin harbour.
- The overblown emoting constantly being done by the actors. The villainous Fletcher was such a pantomime villain, I kept expecting him to twirl his moustache and wear a black cloak and hat whilst going Bwahahahahaha!
- The overuse of the good old cliched running into each other's arms in slow motion. Whenever slow motion starts happening in movies, it's usually bad.
- The telegraphed-far-in-advance killing off of the surplus characters.

All in all, I really wanted to like this movie, but it's just SOOOO confused, cliched and cheesy. It needed warmth and heart. It could have been a movie which led us to love a family of characters living in Darwin, in which case we might have cared more as they are threatened by the war. We could have found out more about the other characters - the upper classes in Darwin, the barkeeper, the soldiers, were all very fleetingly developed. There was no sense of an Australian community under threat - no one we really cared about. We never got to see how typical Australians' lives were affected, as our main characters were very untypical.
 
Saw this earlier in the week... Awful! Overly long, dodgy performances and so, so cheesy. Every cliche in the book was thrown into this one. I literally cringed at certain parts.

And, this may have been a sound problem in my cinema, I'm not sure, but I had trouble even hearing huge chunks of the dialogue.

Avoid.
 
Saw it yesterday and enjoyed it, think the problem is that you think it's over when they reach Darwin - they should have edited it differently so that there are still loose enRAB at this point in the film. When you think the film is over and it isn't even half way through it makes you find it too long. I enjoyed all of the performances and thought the scenery was fantastic. A movie you need to see in the cinema.
 
I'm put off by the length of it (even though I usually don't mind longer movies - two of my favourite films are Titanic and The Dark Knight) and I can tell just from the trailers that I'd find it dull, despite that it looks like a very pretty movie. It looks like a beautifully shot film and a very good advertisment for tourism, but I would rather watch a factual documentary about Australia than this movie.
 
Tricky one, this. If you went in expecting a bit a escapism, some funny bits, some cheesy romance and fab cinematography, you'd be very pleasantly entertained.

However, I am a huge Baz Luhrmann fan and it didn't feel like one of his films. Moulin Rouge managed to combine broad comedy with tragedy and a cracking love story (just like Australia) but in such an original way. Romeo & Juliet was a complete one-off and Strictly Ballroom was charming, quirky, subversively funny while incorporating the cheesy bits in a sweet way and not alienating the ballroom dancing world, despite mercilessly mocking them!

Australia felt like a nice film that Ron Howard or Spielberg or Mel Gibson could have directed. From Luhrmann, I expected something more idiosyncratic - most of his trademarks were missing.

Having said all that, it whiled away a pleasant Saturday afternoon. The performances were good, the Outback looked stuning, but I agree that using Nimrod at the end was completely out of place. Maybe having an Aboriginal soundtrack, which would have sounded both ancient and modern, would have been a bit more Luhrmann-esque and satisfying?

Go see it, but go in without any expectations if possible!
 
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