Australia (2008)

Baz Luhrmann's Australia arrives with the full apparatus of the prestige epic: sweeping vistas, a cattle drive across the Never Never, the bombing of Darwin, and Nicole Kidman fainting on horseback for our entertainment. It wants to be several things at once, a wartime romance, a western, a national myth, and a reckoning, and it achieves most of them at the cost of roughly three hours of runtime. The whole enterprise plays like a tourism commercial that wandered into a history lesson and decided to stay for the dessert course.

The film's conscience is Nullah, the mixed-race boy played by Brandon Walters, who narrates the story and supplies its emotional center. The forced removal of Aboriginal children to Mission Island is treated as the moral spine of the enterprise, and the casting of Aboriginal performers in substantial roles, David Gulpilil among them, was a deliberate choice for a mainstream 2008 production. Luhrmann has described his project as a mythologised Australia, which is a polite way of saying he folded a genuine national atrocity into a romance and trusted the seams not to show. They mostly do not, because the melodrama moves quickly enough to cover them.

Lady Sarah fires a scheming manager and runs a cattle station, which is progress of a sort, though she is ultimately completed by a man in a hat. The villain schemes toward a cattle monopoly, lending the proceedings a faint distaste for greed without much structural ambition behind it. Absent entirely: any trace of queer life, any environmental concern, any interest in body diversity or neurodivergence. The picture lectures, but gently, and never quite raises its voice. What remains is a handsome, overlong, well-meaning spectacle that mistakes length for gravity and hopes nobody checks the arithmetic.