Australia (2008)

I was dragged to this movie last year (as a payback for seeing The Day the Earth Stood Still, which I thought was a great movie even though most people think otherwise).  I was pleasantly surprised at how entertaining Australia was.  The story is a good one,  involving Nicole Kidman as an English aristocrat who hires Hugh Jackman as a cattle drover to move 1500 head of cattle hundreds of miles to Darwin, Australia, in an attempt to make enough money to save her cattle station.

There is much to recommend. There are plenty of interesting sub-plots involving evil barons, aboriginal magic, and Japanese bombings to hold your interest most of the time. The cinematography of the Australian outback is excellent.  I enjoyed the acting, especially the performances of  Jackman and Kidman.

The movie does suffer from a few drawbacks. It  is rather long at over two hours and 45 minutes and is a bit disjointed once the cattle drive (which takes almost two hours to complete) is finished.  I thought the movie was actually over at that point and started to get up to leave.  The use of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” as a musical theme-motif is a bit problematic: it is a nice tune if you hear it once, but gets rather annoying after hearing it over and over again. Some scenes stretched the believability factor to the near-breaking point, but fortunately there weren’t too many of them.

But these drawbacks are minor and shouldn’t keep you from enjoying this blockbuster movie, which was nominated for an Oscar and won numerous other awards for its incredible cinematography.  Highly recommended.

Check the WRL catalog for Australia