Gratuitous Aussie War Movie Review

I finally watched Gallipoli for the first time last evening (after finally getting the girls to go to sleep). Yawn.

If you want a really first class Aussies-getting-kicked-around-by-bloody-minded-Brits-in-the-hell-of-war film, watch Breaker Morant instead. Different war, of course, but same principle and much better done.

Here's a bit more about Morant himself. A tremendous amount of controversy swirls around whether he and other Bushvelt Carbineers - a kind of horse-back Delta Force - went over the line in their guerrilla fight against the Boers, or whether they were railroaded by Kitchener to protect his own image. I don't know the answer. Certainly the perception that Moran and Handcock were judicially murdered to cover Kitchener's backside had a tremendous impact on relations between Australia and Great Britain. Of course, the film takes the pro-Morant view to the hilt. I'd be interested to see a more judicious treatment of the business. The only history of the war I've read, Boer War by Thomas Packenham, skips over the incident in just a few sentences. (If memory serves, Packenham suggests the Australian martyrdom of Morant was not completely justified.)