Casey Phillips: Like most films set in the titular country/continent, “Australia” is a beautifully shot movie. It’s hard to mess up sweeping vistas of rock-strewn deserts and serpentine canyons, but light and color saturate the movie to the point that, at times, it looks like it’s been painted on screen. Fortunately, this storybook-like presentation really fits the cookie-cutter storybook plot. Unfortunately, storybooks shouldn’t be 2 hours 45 minutes long.

It’s as if director Baz Luhrmann had two movies but no studio contract for a sequel, so he decided to just splice them together. The result is a film with too many endings and no intermission. “Australia” is rollicking and gripping at first but eventually ends up feeling stretched out and decidedly long-winded.

Holly Leber: There were definitely about three points at which the film could have ended and nothing would have felt lost. Luhrmann is a decidedly visual director, and his lush set pieces and sharp camera work don’t fail to please the eye. Unfortunately his films, aesthetically pleasing as they are, grow longer with each new one. His first, the lovely and quirky “Strictly Ballroom” clocked in at a modest 94 minutes. With “Australia,” he’s up to 165, and the story just doesn’t merit that much time. It particularly doesn’t merit that much time when the romance has been all but given away in the trailer, or even the poster. They could have saved a lot of time by cutting out some of the smoldering glances. The one character I felt emotionally invested in was Nullah (newcomer Brandon Walters), an Aboriginal boy taken under the very prim wing of Lady Sarah Ashley (Nicole Kidman, arguably the best known Oz girl out there, playing a Brit).

Casey: Since the late-film scenes portraying Japan’s attack on Australia during World War II — a relatively unexplored theater of Hollywood’s favorite war — fell flat, the aboriginal side story is the film’s most interesting element by far. Until the 1970s, Australia forced cultural assimilation on Aborigines by stealing away their children to, as one character in the movie put it, “breed the black out of them” at mission schools. Nullah belongs to this “stolen generation,” which makes for an interesting relationship primer with Ashley, who can’t have children of her own.

The rest of the leads and their relationships are derivative and vanilla to a fault. Kidman is basically replaying her role in “Far and Away,” trading America for Australia. Then again, her love/hate relationship with the rough-and-tumble Drover (Hugh Jackman) is basically carbon copied from every frontier action/romance ever made, from Robert Redford and Meryl Streep in “Out of Africa” to Tom Selleck and Laura San Giacomo in “Quigley Down Under.”

Holly: For the time it took, “Australia” didn’t really develop the characters very well. There wasn’t enough of a build between Kidman and Jackman, for example. They went fairly quickly from contempt to romance.

Luhrman and his team of writers fall into a pretty common trap: underdeveloping the bad guy. Neil Fletcher (David Wenham, who sounds a lot like Dick Van Dyke in “Mary Poppins” despite being a Sydney native) is a pretty despicable character, for a few reasons. Unfortunately, there’s almost no background on why he’s despicable or how he got that way. It made the character too one-dimensional. Even if we’re supposed to hate Fletcher, I need some possibility of sympathy. Otherwise it’s boring.

Casey: Movies can certainly last more than two hours and still be entertaining (for example, see anything by Oliver Stone or Ridley Scott), but not if they don’t have the story to support it. Minus one hour and a 30 percent less-derivative plot, “Australia” might have been a success. As it stands, however, I’ll go ahead and Southern Cross it off my list of movies to see again.

Holly: I generally judge movies by determining whether I’d buy the DVD. If a movie doesn’t merit a place in my collection, I look at whether I’d change the channel if it were on TV. I wouldn’t buy this one, but I’d leave it on in the background while cooking dinner — like maybe Thanksgiving dinner again, next year, to give the movie enough time.

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