cameronackland Not only did this film make me want to tear out my own eyes, but it almost compelled me to sign up to the Guantanamo Bay terrorist wanted list and get myself water boarded just to avoid watching any more of this!

Robert J. Maxwell A cowboy movie in almost all respects except scenery and lingo. (How do you say "vaquero" in the language of the Yir Yuront?) Unlike most cowboy movies it's hard to assess because it's really two movies sitting uneasily side by side. The first movie is DEFINITELY cowboy move. It has a lot of cows. Fifteen hundred head, reckons the expert drover, handsome, robust, dusty Hugh Jackman. A "drover" in 1940 Australia is just a plain old cowboy. He don't fancy sittin' in the big house and foolin' around with figures and such. He likes to be out there where a man can be independent and can breath fresh clean air -- if you don't count cow flops.Nicole Kidman, thoroughly unglamorized, is the new owner of Faraway Downs, a remote ranch that has entered a barren stretch,. She arrives fresh from England, all proper and prim and prejudiced. The American West had its Indians. The outback has its aborigines. She is gradually assimilated into the ways of the Antipodes and when her cheating foreman deserts her with all his hands, she gathers the Blackfellas together with Hugh Jackman and a philosophical drunk, the bags under whose eyes would inflate during a collision, and drives those 1500 head all the way up to Darwin, beating out the mean guy who runs the cattle business hereabouts, King Carney. King Carney is Bryan Brown, known to many through the "F/X" movies, now playing a grizzled monarch of all he surveys. Frankly, I missed Chips Rafferty, a whole generation's go-to Australian sidekick and guide.The score ranges from period renditions of Jerry Gary's famous arrangement of Cole Porter's "Begin the Beguine" to Bach's "Sheep May Safely Graze." The landscape is epic. I love Australia and Aussies. The men outside the cities are into beer and sports. That's enough for me. But nothing else is epic in any sense. The writers have missed no opportunity for heroism and sentimentality in their most uncooked form. That drunken wise fool? Any experienced viewer has him pegged as toast, if not from his very introduction then most certainly after he befriends the cute little half-caste boy with the big black eyes and the belief in magic. The first movie ends more or less happily, a few deaths along the way not counting for very much, when Faraway Downs' functionality is restored, and Jackman and Kidman wind up in each others' arms and the cute little half-caste sits playing a harmonica in the moonlight.Then the second movie begins and it's darker in tone. Jackman, rather too quickly, is overcome by a yearning for the wide-open spaces again and takes off working on a six-month cattle drive for some other ranch. Jackman once had a wife, an aborigine, who was killed because she was an aborigine. Now we are introduced to her brother, Jackman's brother-in-law, who bravely puts into words the feelings that the self-contained, manly Jackson can not. The brother-in-law is toast. I'll skip the plot of the second movie except to say that everyone but Jackman is either dead or thought to be dead, until they reappear from bushes, all smiles.It's a long movie, as I said, long enough for two movies actually. It's full of colorful action and stereotypical characters. Once in a while it's good to relax and let an unchallenging and thoroughly familiar narrative run across the screen, even if it leaves behind nothing much more than insubstantial whirls of desert dust that soon settle back to earth and reveal the distant jagged hills and desiccated mud cracks of spaces totally devoid of life.

grantss Epic? More like epic fail. Predictable, contrived, unrealistic, unimaginative, linear plot, awash with political correctness. The plot is so lame this could easily have been your usual Z-grade made- for- TV movie, the kind you see on free-to-air TV at lunchtime.Baz Luhrmann even takes a leaf out of equally-inept director Michael Bay's book, and rewrites history for the sake of dramatic action. The parallels between Australia and the even-more-craptacular Pearl Harbor are evident.The fact that it stars Nicole Kidman should be a giveaway that this is crap. She acts as she always does, as a prissy princess. This time, however, she is meant to be that, but even then she comes across as unrealistic and irritatingly stuck up.Hugh Jackman does his best with the dud script and dialogue he is given.Worst thing is that the tedium lasts for almost three hours! Luhrmann ignores the first rule of movie-making - if you can't make a good movie, make a short movie.The only things that this movie has going for it is the amazing scenery and some good CGI in the battle scenes (but that is a given for any modern movie).

tibisko I personally enjoyed the movie very much. I find it very deep and emotional. It certainly made me weep several time. Excellent actors, fantastic music, the story is very profound and it certainly delivers a very moving message about love, honor and the spirituality of the locals. Beautiful and emotional, i don't really think that it could have been better. This movie is simply brilliant. As far as i am concerned, the critics are the viewers and we all might enjoy it differently. If the viewer enjoys the movie, than it's a good movie. Simple as that.A true masterpiece! It certainly worth the time watching it.