The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

The plot isn't so bad, but the pace of storytelling is too slow which makes people bored. Certain moments are so obvious and unnecessary for the main plot. I would've fast-forwarded those moments if it was an online streaming. The ending looks like implying a sequel, not sure if this movie will get one

I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

Set in northern Australia before World War II, an English aristocrat who inherits a sprawling ranch reluctantly pacts with a stock-man in order to protect her new property from a takeover plot. As the pair drive 2,000 head of cattle over unforgiving landscape, they experience the bombing of Darwin, Australia, by Japanese forces firsthand. Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman give 2 amazing perfomances in this heart pound Australian Drama and in my opinion this film is underrated and better than Kidman's most recent projects. The actors do a great job, the characters are well written and the sets are breath taking. (A+)

Australia is the kind of grand movie romance that defined classic Hollywood. It's got all the important ingredients: A pair of movie stars, exotic locales, and a heaping helping of melodrama. In the capable hands of Aussie director Baz Luhrmann, who knows a thing or two about movie love stories (Romeo + Juliet, Moulin Rouge), Australia had 'classic' written all over it. Maybe with expectations that high, Australia was bound to disappoint. In any case, Australia is certainly not all it can be.Much like Gone With the Wind, Titanic, or Out of Africa, Australia is a romantic epic that tells the story of an upperclass woman who falls for a dashing rogue. And that's not where the story similarities stop. Australia also takes place in a unique natural landscape and it's set against an important historical event. Australia is not just similar in story construction to these Hollywood classics, it is a direct variation on them. I don't hold that against Australia. The formula obviously works, and if you can put a worthwhile spin on it, I'm all in. Australia has a distinct Aussie flavor, and it's commentary on Australia's Stolen Generation is something we haven't seen in mainstream Hollywood. The cast is made up of just about every major Australian actor working, with welcome turns by David Wenham, Bill Hunter and Ray Barrett to highlight a few . Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman star, and they are exactly what they need to be. Kidman does her thing as the uptight English outsider, and Jackman was born to play the bushman with a heart of gold. There is almost nothing I can say against the structure of Australia. This exact story has been done before, and done very well.As much as I hate to admit it, because I really like him as a filmmaker, Australia's problems start and end with Luhrmann. I suppose he must have had a passion for telling this story. He is Australian, and I'm sure he felt an obligation to do justice to the country's history, specifically the Stolen Generation, but you can't really see that passion on the screen. This is a sloppy piece of work. For starters, Luhrmann never quite finds the right tone for the story. The introductory scenes are kind of playful and more than a little humorous, but as the film moves along, the melodrama begins to take hold. It gives the film a jittery back and forth feeling, as if competing ideas of what type of movie this should be were all thrown in together, elbowing each other for space. The bigger blunder from Luhrmann is the look of the movie. The Australian Outback is one of the most beautiful places on Earth. It doesn't take much to translate that beauty to the screen. And while there are, by sheer volume, plenty of breathtaking vistas on display in Australia, there are far too many ugly ones. Luhrmann relies heavily on sound stages and CGI backgrounds. Digital enhancement is, of course, not a dealbreaker in itself, but the CGI here is so bad, pervasive, and needless that it almost does spoil the rest of the film. There is absolutely no need for this much CGI in a romantic Hollywood epic, especially CGI that looks like a PlayStation 2 game. There is a long, pivotal, cattle driving scene in the middle of the film, and I didn't believe that environment for one second. This is a production that is calling out for old-fashioned filmmaking, and Luhrmann it seems, doesn't have that in him. At least not fully. He tries to have his cake and eat it too when it comes to balancing the art-house elements he's famous for and the traditional elements the material calls for. The result is a movie that is not artsy enough to separate itself from its obvious inspirations, And not traditional enough to stand alongside them.This is a movie stuck in, well, No Man's Land. Luhrmann wants Australia to be a grounded drama about Australian history but he also wants a magic realism tale about an aboriginal twilight. It is not impossible to do both, but Luhrmann only gives half his attention to each. I'm being hard on Australia only because I know it could have been great. The final product is not a bad movie. There is a surplus of ambition and conviction in both leading actors, Kidman and Jackman, and in Luhrmann as the director. This is a solid tale with enough admirable craftsmanship to get a pass from me, but given its potential, Australia is a major disappointment.64/100

A cowboy movie in almost all respects except scenery and lingo. (How do you say "vaquero" in the language of the Yir Yuront?) Unlike most cowboy movies it's hard to assess because it's really two movies sitting uneasily side by side. The first movie is DEFINITELY cowboy move. It has a lot of cows. Fifteen hundred head, reckons the expert drover, handsome, robust, dusty Hugh Jackman. A "drover" in 1940 Australia is just a plain old cowboy. He don't fancy sittin' in the big house and foolin' around with figures and such. He likes to be out there where a man can be independent and can breath fresh clean air -- if you don't count cow flops.Nicole Kidman, thoroughly unglamorized, is the new owner of Faraway Downs, a remote ranch that has entered a barren stretch,. She arrives fresh from England, all proper and prim and prejudiced. The American West had its Indians. The outback has its aborigines. She is gradually assimilated into the ways of the Antipodes and when her cheating foreman deserts her with all his hands, she gathers the Blackfellas together with Hugh Jackman and a philosophical drunk, the bags under whose eyes would inflate during a collision, and drives those 1500 head all the way up to Darwin, beating out the mean guy who runs the cattle business hereabouts, King Carney. King Carney is Bryan Brown, known to many through the "F/X" movies, now playing a grizzled monarch of all he surveys. Frankly, I missed Chips Rafferty, a whole generation's go-to Australian sidekick and guide.The score ranges from period renditions of Jerry Gary's famous arrangement of Cole Porter's "Begin the Beguine" to Bach's "Sheep May Safely Graze." The landscape is epic. I love Australia and Aussies. The men outside the cities are into beer and sports. That's enough for me. But nothing else is epic in any sense. The writers have missed no opportunity for heroism and sentimentality in their most uncooked form. That drunken wise fool? Any experienced viewer has him pegged as toast, if not from his very introduction then most certainly after he befriends the cute little half-caste boy with the big black eyes and the belief in magic. The first movie ends more or less happily, a few deaths along the way not counting for very much, when Faraway Downs' functionality is restored, and Jackman and Kidman wind up in each others' arms and the cute little half-caste sits playing a harmonica in the moonlight.Then the second movie begins and it's darker in tone. Jackman, rather too quickly, is overcome by a yearning for the wide-open spaces again and takes off working on a six-month cattle drive for some other ranch. Jackman once had a wife, an aborigine, who was killed because she was an aborigine. Now we are introduced to her brother, Jackman's brother-in-law, who bravely puts into words the feelings that the self-contained, manly Jackson can not. The brother-in-law is toast. I'll skip the plot of the second movie except to say that everyone but Jackman is either dead or thought to be dead, until they reappear from bushes, all smiles.It's a long movie, as I said, long enough for two movies actually. It's full of colorful action and stereotypical characters. Once in a while it's good to relax and let an unchallenging and thoroughly familiar narrative run across the screen, even if it leaves behind nothing much more than insubstantial whirls of desert dust that soon settle back to earth and reveal the distant jagged hills and desiccated mud cracks of spaces totally devoid of life.

It's 1939 Australia. Lady Sarah Ashley (Nicole Kidman) comes all the way from England to force her husband to sell his cattle station Faraway Downs. She suspects her husband of cheating. He sends Drover (Hugh Jackman) to drive her. Before she gets there, Lord Ashley is killed and Aboriginal elder King George (David Gulpilil) is blamed. She befriends Nullah (Brandon Walters) who is revealed to be King George's grandson. The station manager Neil Fletcher (David Wenham) has been trying to undermine Lord Ashley and working secretly with Lesley 'King' Carney (Bryan Brown) who has all the surrounding lands. King Carney is trying to negotiate with Australian Captain Dutton (Ben Mendelsohn) who needs the beef from Carney's near monopoly. When Fletcher is discovered, Drover and Sarah must lead a ragtag group to drive the cattle to market against Fletcher and his men.The movie starts off horribly broad. The overacting is annoying. The broad comedy isn't funny. Kidman is annoying and Jackman is trying to be Crocodile Dundee. The movie improves markedly once they get to Faraway Downs. The Aboriginals improve the tone by adding some seriousness. Baz Luhrmann is using the landscape like Monument Valley in the old westerns. He's making an Australian western epic. The old style doesn't always work. The characters are too broadly written. None of the comedy is actually funny. And the movie is about an hour too long. It could have been a good action adventure if it wraps up after the cattle drive. Instead, the movie keeps on going with a lot of melodrama and a Japanese attack.