Featurettes on “Photography”, “Production Design”, “Costume Design”, “Locations”, “Visual Effects”, “Editing”, “Australia: The People, the History, the Location”, “Cinematography”, Sound” theatrical trailers, previews

As big, bold, inconsistent as the land it takes place in “Australia” has a winning cast fighting against a clichéd script that attempts to recall the BIG PRODUCTIONS from the 1950’s. That it fails miserably to achieve its goals is irrelevant but that it pulls the audience in and doesn’t give the big pay off the audience deserve is the larger issue here. “Australia” has a tone that veers widely from comic to tragic and that’s not a problem but the shift from one tone to another should be seamless and here you can see all the seams including the frayed stitching that Lurhman uses to try and hold this comforter of a movie together. Unfortunately, the stuffing falls out all too often and it’s a bit messy. ***

Image & Sound:

As beautiful as an Ozzie sunset “Australia” looks terrific in a sharp, well defined transfer that doesn’t suffer over compression or digital over processing. Skin tones look extremely nice capturing the sun burnt look of Hugh Jackman and the pale clear color of Nicole Kidman. ***

The TrueHD soundtrack sounds extremely good. There’s nice use of the surround speakers to put you right in the middle of the Outback. ---

We a featurette entitled “Australia: The People, the History, the Location” a brief and not very enlightening short. ***

“Production Design” is also fairly short but it does give us a sense of how the film was designed. ***

“Photography” gives us still images taken by James Fisher with comments from well known photographers Annie Leibovitz and Doug Kirland. **

“Locations” briefly gives us a glimpse at the landscape where all of this drama takes place. ***

“Music”, “Editing” and “Sound” cover all of those elements in the production of the film and run twice as long as most of the other featurettes I’ve mentioned previously. ***

“Deleted Scenes” runs just under 3 minutes and shows how little Lurhmann cut for the film (at least the good scenes that made the movie). ***

“Visual Effects”, theatrical trailers and previews for other Fox movies round out the other extras and those that were used in the movie managed to be integrated seamlessly into the film. ***

It is disappointing that Lurhmann elected not to provide a commentary track. It also would have been nice to have the stars involved in a commentary track as well. ---

Final Words: