Director: Baz Luhrmann, 12A, 165min

Stars: Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman, Brandon Walters

On general release

With this vast ego-trip of a film, Luhrmann seems more interesting in paying homage to the ignoble tendencies of the Hollywood epic than he is with capturing the complicated history of his country.

Despite its length, scope and the visual richness of the landscape, Lurhmann's portrait of Australia leaves no cliché unmined and no cheap shot untaken. His supporting characters are largely denied any complexity or growth: the whites are almost all irredeemable racists, the Aboriginals are magic men and warrior women. But his worst crime is the glib revisionism of the story. History is rewritten and tidied up to give a swelling tearjerker of an ending. It is manipulative and deceitful, and Lurhmann should know better.

The story takes place in an Australia on the eve of the Second World War. Into this rough and ready world of men of the land, gut-rotting liquor and mystical Aboriginal magic comes an alien creature. Lady Sarah Ashley (Kidman, above with Jackman) is a British aristocrat determined to track down her absentee husband to his ranch. An introduction between the good Lady and the Drover (Jackman), her companion on the long trek across country, results in her precious luggage being defiled and her smalls caught up in a brawl. The initial tone of the film, with the slow-motion shots of flying knickers and Kidman's absurdly mannered performance, is light-hearted to the point of silliness.

But, as a self-important introduction tells us, the film is not just about Australia at war, it's about Australia's war against its own people - the mixed race Aboriginal children who were taken from their parents by the authorities and “re-educated” in church missions. One such child, Nullah (the charismatic youngster Walters), is adopted by Lady Sarah and becomes the film's most problematic story device. The story of the “stolen generation” didn't have a happy ending, and it is disingenuous of Luhrmann to try to give it one.

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