Simply Perfect

Good movie but grossly overrated

Brilliant and touching

The acting in this movie is really good.

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?

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.

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 ****

THE LAST WAVE is never going to win over the mainstream audience. It is a slow-moving but fascinating film for those who are willing to go along with it. An Australian properties lawyer is asked to take on the case of five aborigines accused in the murder of one of their own. All sorts of portents and omens soon pop up, as the man's death involves a tribal issue that was not meant for white man's court, and pretty soon the lawyer is having trouble distinguishing reality from fantasy. It looks like the end of the world may be at hand, and he and the aborigines may know this but no one else does. Richard Chamberlain as the lawyer is at his peak here. David Guptil, a familiar face from several other Australian flicks and a decent actor, is one of the five aborigines on trial. THE LAST WAVE is simply not for everyone, anymore than is MAGNOLIA (both happen to have strange things falling from the sky). Check it out on a slow Saturday night.