Film: Australia

My brief review of Australia:

Third worst film I have seen in the last five years.

My longer review:

Australia didn’t leave me with as strong a feeling of utter rage as Happy Go Lucky, so in some respects Happy Go Lucky was the better film. However I don’t feel I can give a film which was so awful a superlative review by ranking it “worst”, or even “second worst”.

What did I find so “yuck” about this film? My complaint is not that I find “romantic” films to be sentimental clap-trap; actually I left feeling there had been an epic failure to convey any romanticism in the film. My impression was that the editors had been given the task of going through the footage and choosing the scene or angle or take which was the most “emotional” — to the point of continuity errors such as tears streaming down cheeks in one angle and none when viewed from another — and I wonder whether the actors can be proud of the result when they come across as overacting for the whole film?

I found the story simultaneously flawed and using plot devices of convenience, such as Drover’s perfectly-timed arrival at Faraway Downs. I was horrified by the original music (given the constant tugging at audience heart-strings, did the violins ever stop?!), the stereotyped characters with vacuous personalities… and I should not even begin to spew forth bile about the Wizard of Oz themes.

Greg Egan could not foresee Australia when he wrote Distress, but had he been able to I suspect one of the characters would not have chosen Young Einstein as the most apocryphal Australia-related film of the late twentieth/early twenty-first centuries.