Australia

Cast
Nicole Kidman
Hugh Jackman
Brandon Walters
David Wenham
Jack Thompson
Bryan Brown
Screenwriters
Baz Luhrmann
Ronald Harwood
Stuart Beattie
Richard Flanagan
Director
Baz Luhrmann
Running Time
165 minutes

Australia is an epic and romantic action adventure, set in that country on the explosive brink of World War II. In it, an English aristocrat travels to the faraway continent, where she meets a rough-hewn local and reluctantly agrees to join forces with him to save the land she inherited. Together, they embark upon a transforming journey across hundreds of miles of the world's most beautiful yet unforgiving terrain, only to still face the bombing of the city of Darwin by the Japanese forces that attacked Pearl Harbor. (20th Century Fox)

It helps knowing it's really long, which I did, because once the cattle droving story finishes normally the end would be in sight but knowing how long it is I wasn't thrown by it carrying on. I thought OK one plot down and we're on to the next. The first was well done and enjoyable but the second less so, it fundamentally made no sense. The aboriginal and half-aboriginal people had little or no protection under the law but surely the opposite must also have been true, Kidman's character as a rich aristocratic white person would have had plenty of power so surely she could just have insisted the kid stay with her and ordered anyone and everyone she wanted off her land. It held my attention throughout and I wasn't really aware of time going by but the second part [I didn't look at my watch so I don't know what proportion of it that was] kind of played out like a long sprawling epilogue. Afterwards it occurred to me given that it's sort of an Australian western it was strangely lacking any gunfights, which would have solved a lot of problems.