pzilliox

Australia proves that you can have too much of a good thing. I liked every scene in Australia, and yet the resulting whole is less than the sum of it's many, many parts. Imagine if George Lucas hadn't trimmed his original story idea before attempting to make the first Star Wars film, and you've got Australia.

Australia should have been what it is on it's most elemental level: a trilogy. There's a western, then a love story, followed by a war movie. If they'd had enough guts to bet on the success of an initial, trimmed down, fleshed-out film, this could have been one hell of a movie franchise, a la Back to the Future, Star Wars, and Lord of the Rings. As it is, it's a beautiful, well-acted, imaginative, overly-long epic, too long on run time and too short on critical story details and subtext.

Don't get me wrong, I like Australia. But a smaller portion would have been more satisfying, and would have had me clamoring for more.

What this movie intends to do -- to create a troubling dissonance in the viewer through subtle and realistic scenes of claustrophobic alienation -- it does remarkably well. The acting, the script, the camera-work is all spot-on.

Unfortunately, its deft touch left me feeling deeply depressed. This film's manifesto seems to be that none of us can ever truly connect to anybody else. No attempt at love (friendship, devotion, or romance) can ever successfully overcome the barriers between people because of our different lives and circumstances, regardless of whether we share the same culture or not.

It's like an entire film of watching people cling to a life raft, only to discover that no rescue is possible regardless of what they do, or where they go.

How completely depressing a lesson.