Simply Perfect

Sick Product of a Sick System

Crappy film

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

Australia is a weird society. It's filled with good people who enjoy a good life, a much better life than third world folk. The trouble is that good life was gained by the slaughter of it's local population, the Aboriginal people of Australia, a people whose life land and liberty was stolen from them out of sheer evil greed. These are a people that since 1788 White Australia pretends doesn't actually exist. To admit they actually exist, would open White Australia up to dealing with the guilt over its dark past, and possibly dealing with the guilt over the real source of that good life. White Australia can thus be described as a big sooky trust fund baby, every bit as daft as Paris Hilton, a blithering idiot lacking the intelligence to understand or truly appreciate the pain that was wrought to bring about her wealth that she actually, stupidly, feels she arrogantly deserves.Legendary American thinker Mark Twain once wrote that Australian history "does not read like history, but like the most beautiful lies."The fact that a British Actor, and not a White Australian actor, played the role of a White Man defending Aborigines in court in what is in point of fact, a 100% Australian movie, wholeheartedly speaks to the above. It took a foreign born actor to truthfully see the Aussie forest through its racist and pathologically disturbed trees.

A Sydney lawyer (Richard Chamberlain) defends five Aborigines in a ritualized taboo murder and in the process learns disturbing things about himself.Besides being a great film with a legal angle and a murder mystery angle, this is a great look at different cultures (particularly aborigine culture), how they interact, and the concept of "dream time" which may not be known to white Australians and certainly is unknown in the United States.Peter Weir, more than any other director, has really brought Australia to the world and showed its best sides and why we should care.

The Last Wave is an atmospheric and moody film about a man's premonition that a giant wave is going to engulf Australia and most likely the world. It begins with scenes of everyday life in various parts of Australia being disrupted by freak weather patterns. Only the Aboriginal people seemed to understand what is going on. Enter a lawyer who is representing a group of Aboriginal men after an altercation in a pub ends in the death of a young man. He agrees to defend them although he is not a criminal lawyer and that is when his life starts to unravel. Strange weather and visions of an upcoming apocalypse plague the lawyer and slowly he realizes that the world is going to end. This is one of the finest films of the genre and one of my favourite Peter Weir films. The settings are dark and at times, almost Gothic. The acting is spot on and Richard Chamberlain is absolutely perfect in the role as the lawyer, a rational man caught in a terrifying situation. While it's not easy to find a copy of the movie here in Australia, if you can, see it. It is a chance to see Australian film making at it's best

I saw this film yesterday at my local independent cinema. Both its main man, Chamberlain, and the director Weir are unknown to me although I gather from looking around here that both have had pretty illustrious careers.I won't revisit the plot. Lots of other people have already done that. Suffice to say, the film's main strength, for me, was its unsettling ambiance. Much of that has to do with Chamberlain's unfathomable persona and vaguely alien looks. The electronica soundtrack adds to the mood. The script is spartan, with room to breathe, which further adds to the unsettling tone.The special effects are as simplistic as you'd expect from an Australian film made at the back end of the 70s.As someone else has mentioned, the climax "wave" probably suffers as a consequence of budgetary limitations.