Australia

Australia is being sold as a film with epic sweep but you might want to just sweep this one under the rug. Years ago, after Moulin Rouge but before Oliver Stone's Alexander, Baz Luhrmann had his first sweeping epic, a version of Alexander the Great, set to go. Dino De Laurentiis was the producer, the script was polished, Leo Di Caprio was on board, locations had been secured in Morocco. Baz's Al got 86'd because the Stone version beat it to the punch. I would like to see that never made film. Films tend to get scraped because of similarity to other projects, but not always. For instance there were two Titanics in production around the same time, the lesser known one was made for television (1996) and starred a then unknown Catherine Zeta Jones.
There's no chance however that anybody was making a project similar to Australia. For one thing it's kind of a pastiche of movie magic moments from an alternative universe where Duel in the Sun, Pearl Harbor and Rabbit Proof Fence are all the same film. The production values are top notch, there's plenty of sweeping high angle shots, and the movie stars fit their clothes well. Australia want to be the greatest film ever made yet it feels like the quickest film ever made. Surely a director as good as Luhrmann could tool this film to a finer point. Only Australia seems to represent the current mode of Hollywood output where the importance rests more on opening date coinciding with the cover story for a magazine (Sexiest Man Alive Hugh Jackman? I think not baby puppy.) than producing the highest degree of filmed entertainment.
Nicole Kidman arrives at a remote plantation in Northern Territory, Australia. In the years leading up to WWII the Australian government relocated Aboriginal children, a point that's introduced in a roughly developed subplot involving an incredibly charismatic urchin. The kid hides in Kidman's water tower whenever the sheriff drives around. Kidman hires Jackman to be the ranch drover, a function Jackman performs with extreme machismo. Naturally Kidman and Jackman hook up after ignoring each other and I really wouldn't have minded all the bickering if the film paid off with any leading actors chemistry. It doesn't. They ride horses together but the cattle sequences are routine. The film starts to get going, both editing and plot wise as we move into the third act and the beginning of WWII. The Japanese bomb Darwin, a port city closest to the Pacific Theater, yet the sequence is over quick and not without CGI issues.
The confrontation that occurs on an island between Jackman and his posse of Aboriginal dudes and Japanese soldiers puts the film on a perilous slope that Luhrmann's style makes even more operatic and overwrought. The use of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" emphasizes a fantasy bedside story Kidman recites to the kid. The Oz allusion fits too since Australia is Oz, get it. There's a tad too much of that in Australia, yet it's too predictable a programmer to really care.