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Alternate subject lines for this post:
"Australia: It tried so very, very hard."
"Australia: Why every woman is in love with Hugh Jackman."
"Australia: Every cowboy Western film that wasn't."
"Australia: A movie of sequencial screencaps."
"Australia: The Bad Movie! starring Beautiful People, in Beautiful Places, with special appearances by Floating Camera."
"Australia: It's not Pearl Harbor. Because it's set in Australia, see?"

The film Australia wanted to be a lot of things. It wanted to big, which it was. It wanted to be epic, which it wasn't. It wanted to be romantic, which it twiddled its thumbs through, and it wanted to be tragic, which it completely failed at.

This film was a paint-by-numbers war epic, so predictable that I was bored and realized that if I'd been renting the film instead of in a theater I'd have quit halfway through. It was rife with cliches-- SO MANY OMG. And, not even subtle cliches. Big, glaring, ridiculous cliches. The whole thing felt so contrived that I couldn't believe any of it or afford it any real emotional investment. I laughed, a lot. I laughed in many places where I'm pretty sure you weren't supposed to laugh, and I wasn't the only one.

The movie wasn't ALL bad. It wasn't as bad as Pearl Harbor, because Pearl Harbor didn't have the adorable (if slightly annoying) beautiful magic kid that sings. That kid saved this movie for me. He was a bit over-used, and there were way too many close-ups of his big, gorgeous child eyes, but he nevertheless charmed everyone, me included.

Though they were few and far between, there were a few moments of cinema magic in Australia: the terrible singing scene, the cliff, the rain, the burning hull of a ship in the background. And that shower thing in front of the tent was pretty great--that was back when the film wasn't trying to take itself seriously.

Overall: C-, and it would have been lower if it weren't for some gorgeous staged camera-shots of gorgeous people, the little kid actor, and Hugh Jackman's sexy body.