Just Another Australia Review

Well, here it is. With almost every aspect of this film having been dissected and scrutinized, I feel the only contribution worth giving is my own review of the film as a whole. Baz Luhrman, though obviously a successful director, is not usually my cup of tea. Romeo and Juliet and Moulin Rouge were both heavily stylized, with a unique set design and camera work that has become Luhrman's calling card.
I was hoping, however, that this film would be different. When one names a movie after an entire continent, it's kind of implied that the nature of the film itself will be pretty epic. In some ways, this film was. Luhrman certainly hit just about every topic we've talked about in class, from wide open land to the Aussie battler, and managed to scrape together a story that included members of every culture and race on Australia, which widened the umbrella even more. He also threw some obvious shout-outs to the canon of Aussie film, with a lot of Walkabout references scattered all over the place.
And this might be my biggest problem with the film, for by trying to hit every little marker, the story and conflict were cheapened. Every character was essentially brought to their cliche base. The half caste kid can stop a herd of stampeding cattle through his understanding of nature, Nicole Kidman's British character is stuffy and originally is seen as unfit to survive the harshness of the Outback, and Hugh Jackman is a class A Australian badass who doesn't take shit from anyone, except maybe Kidman. These are just a couple, but really the whole film tries to do too much because it scatter bombs, attempting to hit every cultural point in a film that's three hours long. Had they picked a few points to hit, instead of so many, they would have been able to concentrate more on creating real characters and not archetypal placeholders. Of course, this film was made to be marketable, like most films, which in this case was a problem only because it so clearly dominated every aspect of it. The story had to be relatively simple, and they probably felt like they had to hit every point to increase the amount of people who would want to view it.
But I digress, since I started by talking about the style. I was happy to see that he had at least toned it down, enough so that I didn't immediately pass the movie off as utterly ridiculous. Still pretty stylized, with a lot of unecessary camera movement and a set design that was also fairly characteristic of Luhrman. This didn't do too much to hamper the movie to me however, and was to be expected in the end.
All in all, I can see why we were assigned to view this movie, as in some ways it is a culmination of everything we've spoken of in class. I just wish it could have been culminated a bit better.