It looks a dream - beautifully shot, gorgeous design and landscapes, etc. It's heart is in the right place. But it's so flawed as a drama. The 1940 film had a silly storyline but it moved. This doesn't move. It keeps stopping.
It's as though Ian Jones constantly wanted to "surprise the audience by doing the unexpected" and just sucked the drama out of it. The Aussies are going to brawl with the Brits and... the Brits cheer the Aussies. So there's no brawl. No pay off. Gary Sweet has to shoot a horse... who we've just met. We meet Peter Phelps in rural Victoria and all these horses... then jumps to the desert. Why even have the scenes in Victoria. (The opening spiel indicates it will tell the story of the horses as well as the men, and that would've made sense... to set up that it was going to tell the story of a horse as well).
I guess it was interesting to have Phelps as a hero who realises he can't kill - that was different. If not very exciting.
The film doesn't have a clear hero, which, I mean I get it, but it's unsatisfactory. You've got Peter Phelps as the newbie, Jon Blake as the swashbuckling Han Solo type and John Walton hamming it up as an ocker and Anthony Andrews as a spy. Actually Blake hardly does anything until the end except hang around when he's the most heroic at the end. The film's soul is in a mini series, I think - all those different protagonists would have worked better.
The one time the film takes flight is during the final charge - with rapid editing, and fire, and there's momentum rather than just endless elegant shots of horse riding on the horizon.
They would've been better off starting with the climax and plotting backwards - really focusing the movie around Blake, Walton and Phelps. I think ditch Andrews altogether - he pulls focus. Make a horse the main character. I'm not joking. They don't service their leads enough - like, that chat Phelps has with an officer about not wanting to shoot... give that to Blake.
The romance between Phelps and Sigrid Thornton is so undercooked - he's a patient, she's a nurse, the end. Thornton is professional but looks bored. She seems too old for Phelps. Betty Bryant's role in Horsemen was great - she was active, dressed as a boy, spied, saw her father killed, got laid. Here Thorton puts her hands on a brow and writes a letter.
Gerard Kennedy looks silly. Shane Briant and Tony Bonner make it feel like TV.
It's beautiful. But stately. Images rather and action.
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