On Walkabout Movie Review: The Australia Movie

Introduction

I spent this Thanksgiving back in the US and my wife and I made sure to that we would go out and watch the movie premier of director Baz Luhrmann’s Australia movie. We were both expecting this film to be a great movie and a hit in the US considering the rather good impression Americans have of Australians and the sheer lack of quality movies currently being released.

You can watch the trailer for the movie below:

However, since we are now back in the US we noticed a lack of promotion of the movie on TV. This lack of promotion of the movie was my first sign that maybe this movie is not as good as I expected. This lack of promotion of the movie became quite evident when my wife and I attended the premier of the movie today and the theater was nearly empty. Yes I know it is a holiday in the US by the theater literally had five people in it plus my wife and I.

Anyway my wife and I were still excited to see the movie anyway and even wore t-shirts and hats from Australia to the theater. I know it is corny but like I said before we were excited to see a film about Australia. However, after watching the entire film that would be as excited as we would get because the movie was a bit of a let down.

The Plot

Basically the movie is about British aristocrat, Lady Sarah Ashley (Nicole Kidman) who travels to Australia in search of her husband who went to the continent to sell his holdings in a cattle station there. Ashley thinks her husband is having an affair there and wants to confront him. With the aid of a man only known in the movie as the The Drover (Hugh Jackman) she travels to her husband’s cattle station in the Northern Territory Outback and discovers he has been murdered.

Ashley discovers that a rival rancher has been stealing cattle from the station in order to bankrupt it and then claim the land. To save the ranch Ashley decides to conduct one last cattle drive with the aid of The Drover and his friends to the port city of Darwin to sell the cattle to the Australian Army and receive enough money to save the ranch. During the cattle drive she falls in love with The Drover which watching the movie seemed extremely peculiar considering just a few days prior she was looking at the murdered body of her husband. That fact alone for me anyway killed any romance in the movie plus Kidman and Jackman if you can believe this, had very little chemistry in the movie and their dialogue was unimpressive. Finally, who wants to watch romance develop with a woman who is willing to dump the memory of her husband in such a short time? Not me, but I am willing to bet there are probably plenty of women out there who do the same thing to make out with Hugh Jackman. 😉

Anyway if this movie just stayed with the cattle drive to save the ranch storyline I think the movie would have been much better then it is. However, the film continued on and on, and on some more, ultimately ending with the Japanese bombing of Darwin during World War II. This movie was so long (3 hours) that I felt like I was watching multiple movies, especially considering how the plot went in different directions. The whole bombing of Darwin storyline should have been saved for sequel and not even have been in this movie.

Problems with the Movie

Some other problems with the movie was the lack of character development in the movie that when characters die I could care less since the director spent little time developing any emotional attachment between the characters and the audience. I found it interesting that with two heavy weight stars in the movie like Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman, the most memorable character in the movie was the young Aboriginal boy Nullah played by Brandan Walters who has never starred in a movie before.

Brandon Walters also happened to be the same kid used in the new Australia tourism commercials that are trying to take advantage of publicity from the Australia movie.

Also the movie used way to much computer animations and the animations were quite poorly done. Australia has incredible landscapes but for whatever reason the director Baz Luhrmann spent more time showing computer animations then the real Outback. When Luhrmann got around to showing some sweeping vistas of the Outback they were stunning, why couldn’t the entire movie had been like that?

Also the history and geography in the movie was inaccurate. For example they are conducting a cattle drive south to north in the Northern Territory to Darwin yet they end up in the Bungle Bungles in Western Australia. Some examples of historical inaccuracies was that while traveling through the Outback Hugh Jackman’s character sees a large American Army contingent traveling towards Darwin. The US Army never deployed a force to Darwin and they sure the heck wouldn’t be traveling through the middle of the Outback on no roads to get there. The US Army Air Corps at the time deployed aircraft at runway strips around Darwin but never deployed a conventional Army force.

Plus the most glaring example of historical inaccuracy was the bombing of Darwin itself. In the movie the entire city of Darwin was destroyed by the bombing killing many civilians. The movie even had the Japanese bombing a children’s school on an island just off of Darwin and then followed that by having a Japanese force land on the island looking to kill survivors. The Japanese during the first bombing of Darwin in February 1942 did not destroy the entire town and they never even landed a force on Australian territory.

Something else I didn’t like was the dwelling on the political topic of the “Stolen Generations” which is the claim that the Australian government for racist reasons was stealing Aboriginal children. This is far from being a cut and dry issue and yet throughout the movie the stealing of Aboriginal children comes up all the way to the end credits. The movie in my opinion didn’t need to dwell into such politics especially for a movie wanting to promote Australia because the film makes Australians look like a bunch of racists which is not the case.

Plus I found the depiction of the Aborigines in the film to be very stereotypical and not accurate with Aboriginal characters in the movie casting magic spells and communicating by telepathy. If you want to watch a film that gives a much better depiction of Aboriginal life in the bush long ago, I recommend watching Ten Canoes because the Australia movie does not.

In fact I found the low budget film Ten Canoes that does not have any English because the actors speak only their native Aboriginal language more entertaining then the big budget Australia film. That should tell you something about how disappointing this big budget movie production was.

Conclusion

The Australia movie should have been a Lonesome Dove staged in the Outback with sweeping vistas of Australia. Instead Australia was turned into a movie weighed down with political statements, a convoluted plot, and clunky computer graphics. This movie could have been so much better if the characters were more memorable, the storyline focused on the cattle drive and not political statements, and if less computer graphics and more sweeping vistas of Australia were used. This would have made the movie more enjoyable and even opened up a possible sequel to the film focused on the bombing of Darwin.

Finally I would be surprised if this movie does anything to really increase Australian tourism like The Lord of the Rings trilogy did to increase tourism in New Zealand. This is because first of all the movie is no where near as good as The Lord of the Rings and the movie did not focus as much as it should on the Australian scenery . Secondly with the movie’s heavy focus on the Stolen Generations, who wants to visit a country of white racists?

So yes the movie has a lot of problems and was a let down. I would be surprised if it even tops the box office this weekend and once word of mouth about the movie spreads it probably won’t even remain in the Top 10 very long. This is unfortunate for a movie that should have been a box office hit and will instead probably be destined to be in the discount DVD bin at Wal-mart in the non too distant future.