Review of Australia (2008) by Dawdlingpoet — 28 Nov 2021

This is a historical drama, covering themes including racial inequality, acceptance, trust and determination. The first thing I noticed about it was the clear stereotypes of both the Australians and aristocratic/upper class English people. Kangaroos feature within the first twenty minutes as well, plus there's the clear sound of everyones favourite Australian musical instrument, the wobbleboard! so it would be wrong to say that this film doesn't carry a number of obvious cliches and panders to set stereotypes but then you may well have expected this to be the case, given the rather critical reception I believe it received on its release.

There are some lovely landscape, panoramic style shots featured in between scenes and the like and I imagine it would do well being viewed from as large, or wide, a TV screen as possible. This is one of those films that would have been well worth seeing at the cinema for this reason. There is narration during the film, provided by a young boy, a native Australian (Aborigine). He gives a strong sense of naivety and innocence to the plot in his descriptions during said narration. I felt that it was a relatively immersive film, with a decent use of incidental music at key moments helping to make viewers feel confused and concerned about what may happen next, as the characters involved would have at that point.

It is quite dramatic in parts although overall the plot pace was relatively slow to moderate I suppose. This is a particularly long film, with a running time of approximately 2 hours and thirty five minutes and so its clearly hardly a case of a 'short and sweet' film, both in plot and in actual running time.

I felt that the main letdown of this film was the aforementioned caricatures that were the main characters. The cast provided decent performances but I can't ignore the fact that both Drover and Lady Sarah Ashley sounded like cliched stereotypes of the countries their from. I did enjoy watching the film and I felt that as far as the visuals and some of the cast are concerned, their pretty good but I found myself struggling to take it entirely seriously. Drover is played by Hugh Jackman, who is your typical macho type true adventurer Australian (think of, perhaps, a mix of Crocodile Dundee and the late Steve Irwin perhaps), while Nicole Kidman plays Lady Sarah Ashley, someone who frankly I'm surprised wasn't shown as passing out under what surely was a very hot summers day on her arrival, given her fragile stature and delicate skin (remember that she is English of course). The fact that Nicole herself is Australian and yet she plays the English character in this film I found to be rather ironic, although she does well (as usual) in portraying her character. I should perhaps also mention that Hugh Jackman is also Australian. I suppose, due to this, I can't entirely accuse him of putting on an overly fake Australian accent as such as I presume it to be his mother tongue as it were but still the dialogue and accents, certainly at times, didn't quite sit with me entirely well, make of that what you will.

Some scenes I felt were quite touching, scenes featuring Lady Sarah Ashley spending time with the native Australian for example. For the most part, the music is quite theatrical, classical in style and it accompanies the wide shot panoramas quite well. It definitely helps make it seem more of a cinematic classic type film, although I find it hard to ignore the more lazy aspects of the characters, accents and all. I couldn't quite get away from the feeling that some aspects of the film were rather 'convenient' shall we say but equally I don't think it would be fair to completely slate it for that reason alone. I did find it surprisingly watchable overall, given my doubts based on what I've heard others say of it. I do try to be open minded when watching films in general.

I noticed the ocassional scene featured fairly mumbled dialogue, which may be slightly difficult for those who are hard of hearing to entirely follow but this is only an issue now and again and not constantly throughout the film. There was also what I felt to be an amount of cheesiness present, due to the way the plot panned out but I won't say anymore so as not to spoil the film. Its definitely not an entirely positive or negative film plot wise.

The cast do a pretty decent in their roles and I liked the narration used but I did feel that some plot aspects seemed slightly 'convenient' and its not the sort of thing I'd make time to watch very often, mainly as I don't usually watch films much over two hours long but thats a personal thing. Its not really awful and I feel it could have been better, so overall I suppose I'll leave it up to you to decide whether you'd like to see it and I'll go for a 5 out of 10 rating overall and select undecided, as far as recommending it is concerned.