Misunderstood

Rating: 8/10 (2 August 2006)

Having just read a large number of the other comments, by people who loved the film, and by those that thought it was awful, you can see something of a pattern emerge. Most of the people who thought it was awful don't connect with the style of the film, and given that it has such an in-your-face style, if you don't connect there, then I can well imagine that you'd find it boring, frenetic, lame, etc, etc.
It is worth observing at the outset, that the style is very much that of opera - melodramatic, hyper-real, fantastic (as in "fantasy", rather than "really good"). I enjoy this style myself, but I can readily believe other people disliking it intensely.
One common objection by people who disliked it is that either the film has no plot, or that the plot is not original. The plot is there, and it is essentially the same story used in several operas of the 19th century, and more than one musical of the 20th. The important insight that helps one understand this film, is that in a well honored tradition stretching back to Homer, the plot is not the "point" of the work, but rather the scaffolding on which the story-telling occurs. In opera, it is most unusual to walk in to the theater without already knowing the plot. Homer's "Odessy" and "Iliad" are both stories that would have been known by his audience. In both cases, the cleverness, the art, is in how the story is told. Moulin Rouge! is very much opera for the big screen, and it is built on this conception of story-telling. So, yes, it is style over substance, and deliberately so.
That said, if a plot is to be successful scaffolding to tell an engaging story, then it has to have some bones to it. This classic story of the consumptive courtesan who falls in love has lots of song themes in it about what is important in life, life's fleeting nature, and so on. Where the film loses many people, who haven't connected to the operatic style, is that having communicated enough bits of the plot to tell us which story is being told (and the bookend structure tells us that right away), there is no obligation to join all the dots. Having given us the message that it is *this* story, it can skip over the details of the plot in order to concentrate on which ever aspects of the telling it likes.
This is clear in how the snatches of song are used. The goal is evocation rather than elucidation.
Anyway, enough criticism.
I recommend this film, not because I can predict whether it will be to your taste or not, but because it is an excellent example of a very different style of story-telling to what we usually see in film.