Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful

Crappy film

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

First few times I saw this I saw it as a fun mystical apocalypse I was sorta into apocalypse masochistic thinking in the 70s. Weir does set a hell of a mood.However I see an agenda here...white people disillusioned loosing faith in their own science, religion and mystical rites turn to foreign exotica. Add to this guilt for something their ancestors did. This time its not just to the Brit convicts the anti-hero is descended from but we goes back thousands of years to a white culture that survived an apocalypse, moved to South American and built the Mayan civilization then moved to Australia!Our anti-hero is the sole survivor of Atlantis! Odd that no whites are depicted anywhere in South American Indian art as shown in this movie, perhaps that civilization was wiped out and all evidence?Well back to the agenda, there is a strong apologia for Aborigine ritual murder, (its tribal so its legal!) (Just like the ritual rape of nubile females by tribal elders in the outback as part of their coming of age...now that's really self serving male porkchopery!)Finally the 300 foot wave comes and I guess wipes out Sydney and drowns the whites....so do the aborigines escape or do they sacrifice themselves for the other tribals in the outback?

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.

In Australia, four Aborigine men stand accused of causing the death of, or perhaps murdering, one of their own; a white taxation lawyer becomes involved, but he can't seem to break through to the secretive defendants--nor can he shake the feeling that something is terribly amiss in his own life, which is juxtaposed by the freaky-wet weather. Would-be apocalyptic mishmash from director and co-writer Peter Weir begins with a marvelously spooky sequence in the schoolyard (where hailstones fall from a cloudless sky), yet the eerie beauty of that opening is allowed to dribble away in a melodramatic study of class and race guilt--the wealthy and powerful whites versus the poor black Aboriginals--underscored with supernatural flourishes. Weir wants to be profound and serious, so there's nothing intrinsically mysterious or exciting about the lawyer's prophetic dreams, nor his relationships with the Aborigine tribe or his wife and daughters. A potentially fascinating situation is kept ominously mundane, while lead actor Richard Chamberlain drifts through in an anxious fog. *1/2 from ****

When I saw that a DVD of this Australian movie directed by Peter Weir was at my local library, I immediately checked it out. I knew that Richard Chamberlain-star of such miniseries as "Centennial", "Shogun", and "The Thorn Birds"-was in this and he played a man defending an Aboriginal for murder. What I didn't expect were the various dream-like sequences in Chamberlain's mind nor the culture lesson concerning the tribal legends of Australia. This certainly was an eye-opening movie to watch for me and despite some slow moving scenes, it's a fascinating watch throughout. I really don't want to reveal anything else so I'll just say that I highly recommend The Last Wave.