Australia (2008) (Blu Ray) - 7/10

I'm a sucker for big budget historical epics and was truly pumped seeing the previews for Australia but after one viewing in theatres and again on Blu Ray tonight, I have to say that all the ingredients are there but there is just something missing to make this movie ownable. The first thing I have to say though is that the cinematography of this movie is amazing, the Blu Ray looks awesome and has this bright filter to most of the shots which gives a realism to the outback locations while also emphasizing the Baz style of glossy flare where green screen and stage shots are used to enhance the background with Visual FX. I'd say the movie you can most compare this to looking like is King Kong, which is one of my faves of all time. Actually, when zooming out to reflect the entire production and scope of this movie, everything works from afar as it has great characters, a sweeping score, costumes, action, special fx, and a kind of larger than life scale that fits the landscape and tone of the film. But from the beginning they make the biggest mistake I can see in the film in giving the young aboriginee kid the entire voiceover narration, which kind of took me out of the fantasy realm and instead was annoying to the point where I realized they were trying to make a statement about the hardships and slavery these Australian kids experienced following Pearl Harbor. Hugh Jackman's "Drover" character is by far the coolest and carries the entire movie on his shoulders, Nicole Kidman was fine as the fish out of water yuppie who must fall in love with the landscape/man to save her cattle ranch against the bad guys. There are certain scenes and secondary characters in the movie though that have no meaning in the overall plot, making me wish they would have almost changed the order of the action scenes instead of spacing everything out so much. Another thing that bothered me was the vagueness and shallow arc of the villians where we only see them rarely or they're mentioned as doing something but in reality it should have focused more on WWII being the bad guy instead of the stereotypical, money hungry crook. The cattle stampede and the bombing of Darwin are some highlights that made this movie enjoyable and the music really rocks during some of the overhead zooming out shots but overall I felt that they tried too hard to capture the look of Australia but didn't let us really care about the characters enough. There's a corniness and humor to this that doesn't make it a love story or action epic and instead just makes it an overblown mess of costumes, dust, and tourist ad which is sad b/c this could have been so much better.