Well, it’s official. Australia is crap. The only raging debate amongst reviewers world wide is exactly why the movie that was supposed to save our film industry is quite this woeful — Nicole Kidman (and her immovable forehead) is a primary target. But apparently cliches can make a movie and a few starry-eyed Americans think Australia is so bad it’s good…:
Nicole Kidman drifts about like a lost porcelain doll. Kidman is exquisitely accomplished at being awful. Did anyone see Cold Mountain? The sweeping American epic (note: another epic) foundered on the rocks of her gormless mirror-gaze. She can’t act. Instead, she drifts around films like a lost porcelain doll, looking frozen, brittle and vapid, staring at the camera with her oh-golly-look-how-I’m-looking-interesting blue eyes. — Times Online
How can one do justice to Baz Luhrmann’s overripe epic Australia? It’s several types of primitive melodrama — cattle-drive Western, war picture, anti-racist message movie — whirred together, burnished with state-of-the-art CGI, and blessed with dialogue that defies parody. Jackman has musical-theater chops and knows how to sell material this ham-handed; Kidman isn’t quite as deft. I’ve always admired her gumption in working so hard to overcome a certain temperamental tightness — but that tightness has now spread to her skin. — New York Magazine
Throw another cliché on the barbie. It’s a mystery to me how Baz Luhrmann continues to be regarded as a director worth following. A long time has passed since I’ve regarded his lush, loud, defiantly unsubtle output with anything but dread. In Australia, his new romantic-epic-Western-protest-war drama, Luhrmann’s dedication to cliché has become so absolute, it starts to verge on a kind of genius. There’s not a single music cue that isn’t obvious (swelling strings to indicate heartbreak, wailing didgeridoo to signal aboriginal nobility). Nary a line of dialogue is spoken that hasn’t been boiled down, like condensed milk, from a huge vat of earlier Hollywood films. — Slate
Baz Luhrmann’s Australia an ‘unwieldy mess’; Nicole Kidman ‘painfully corny’. With Australia, Luhrmann obviously intends to stage a grand romance against the epic backdrop of World War II. But what we get instead is an unwieldy mess that needed another six months in the editing room. Far worse, however, is the racial double standard in a film that proudly pats itself on the back for its own decency. Luhrmann aims to teach us about Australia’s shameful missionary policies, which took mixed-race Aboriginal children from their families to be raised among whites. The way he does this is by killing off Nullah’s biological mother, so Kidman can nobly care for him. — New York Daily News
Australia is good-looking but stale and overlong. Australia really should have been made 60 years ago. It would have been timelier, with its tale of life in the remote north of that country during World War II. The juicy overacting, stereotypes and dramatic exaggerations would have been more in keeping with the style of the Golden Age of Hollywood. And I would not yet have been born, so I could have lived a full cinematic life without seeing it. Australia is an unbroken string of clichés. Director Luhrmann does the obvious at every turn, making each character an archetype and every action a crowd-pleasing, grandiosely predictable moment. — Charlotte Observer
Australia: Epic romance Down Under. Have you seen everything Australia has on offer a dozen times before? Sure you have. It’s a movie less created by director and co-writer Baz Luhrmann than assembled, Dr. Frankenstein-style, from the leftover body parts of earlier movies. Which leaves us asking this question: How come it is so damnably entertaining? —Time
Too much is sometimes just too much, no matter what the philosophical underpinnings. But if you are willing to take the plunge and view things through Luhrmann’s prism, Australia does deliver the classic dramatic and romantic satisfactions its ambitious advertising campaign promises. That ultimate success seems unlikely early on as Australia makes itself difficult to understand by throwing a ton of plot information at us with expressions and accents so authentically Aussie the specifics are at times hard to follow. — LA Times
Hey no one said it was perfect
Why are overseas publications trying so hard not to give offense to this movie? I am suffering from a severe case of Shadenfreude. Known to my friends (yes I do have some) as being able to spot a turkey before it galumphs into the home straight. I knew this was going to be a Golden turkey the minute Baz Luhrmann mentioned the project. Nothing personal Baz. But here are some of the main errors made.
1). The saga of a nation seldom works, possibly because directors feel encouraged to throw every cliché in the book at it. 2) The outback has been done to death. 3)Just because you were able to raise finance on your two previous opuses, shouldn’t have encouraged you to believe you were another DW Griffiths. 4) Nicole Kidman couldn’t act her way onto the last train out of Paris. Her face is a blank cheque upon which nothing can be, or ever has been, or ever will be written. 5) Only a person carried away with their own brilliance could have ventured onto the GREAT STAGE OF RACISM. Even if your name had been Jesus Christ, you would have antagonized fifty percent of your audience. That’s not fair. Christ would have known better. Finally, I just hope the wonderful Hugh Jackman won’t be stigmatized by all of this.
Times Online: I’d forgotten how much I loved you!
From radio reviewer on breakfast on 2HD in Newcastle:
“Think of a 600 page Mills&Boon novel titled Crikey.”
Put me a good mood till I hit the traffic.
Why Nicole Kidman, why Bazza why??!!!
She’s unAustralian!
Hopefully she exiles herself , her offspring and her accent to the US and goes back to making epics like BMX Bandits
That wasn’t the only positive review that was left out.
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/australia/
So yes, I agree with Matt and Paul’s comments. OK, I don’t plan to see it either, but maybe, just maybe, you should mention the opinions of more than those who just happen to agree with the result you were so earnestly hoping for (as satisfying as it might be to see a film so over-hyped fall flat on its face).