The trailer for Baz Luhrmann’s first film since 2001’s Moulin Rouge, Australia, starring Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman is now online and I’ll be damned if it doesn’t look like they are simply presenting the spectacle rather than giving us the full story.
The story sounds like a great throwback to old school westerns, but I fear this determined use of CGI landscapes, such as the obvious and awful looking one above (captured directly from the trailer), is beginning to hurt films. Why not just use the rough and tumble world that exists? This film has a budget somewhere around $100 million, but considering it was shot in Australia what is the need for the LucasFilm-looking CGI-ness?
Check out the trailer and tell me if you agree by clicking here or on the image above.
Australia will have a huge Oscar push when it opens on November 14 and is described as a romantic action-adventure set in northern Australia prior to World War II, centering on an English aristocrat who inherits a ranch the size of Maryland. When English cattle barons plot to take her land, she reluctantly joins forces with a rough-hewn cattle driver to drive 2000 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.
