It will be worth watching for Mandy Walker's spectacular cinematography alone, but please, please, please Do Not Suck :
Not mentioned much yet in the media is that there is, apparently, a potentially controversial sub-plot involving Aboriginal children (or at least one as the trailer seems to indicate) being stolen away from their families. I think a controversy should begin over those cowboy movie-style swinging doors hanging in an Australian pub. Pffft, they won't keep the blowies out.
More on the plot of 'Australia' from the IMDB :
Luhrmann's film is set in northern Australia prior to World War II and centers on an English aristocrat (Kidman) who inherits a cattle station the size of Maryland. When English cattle barons plot to take her land, she reluctantly joins forces with a rough-hewn stock-man (Jackman) to drive 2,000 head of cattle across hundreds of miles of the country's most unforgiving land, only to still face the bombing of Darwin, Australia, by the Japanese forces that had attacked Pearl Harbor only months earlier.If director Baz Luhrmann gets it right, many Australians who see this film will be absolutely shocked by the scale of destruction inflicted on Darwin by Japanese bombers, and surprised at how little they knew about what happened there all those years ago.
'Australia' needs to do huge business just to turn a profit, hundreds of millions of dollars around the world. It needs to be as big as Titanic was at the Australian box office, in fact it needs to knock it from the top spot, but the movie doesn't appear to have anything like the same youth appeal.
Hopefully, teen appeal won't be necessary for this movie to go epic because it's hard to imagine how a love story between two 40-somethings covered in dust and cow shit will pack in the kids and get that essential word of mouth happening that keeps youth coming back to see it at the cinema again and again, thereby driving up the box office, as they did with Titanic.
The cast for 'Australia' is absolutely spectacular, it looks fantastic, it should work. If it does indeed box office up a half billion dollars around the world, we could finally get something of an AustralianFilm Renaissance firing up. Maybe. But am I the only one who gets the giggles during some parts of that trailer?
Oh, please do not suck...
