A war movie that is not about war(?).

Rating: 10/10 (16 January 2015)

As a migrant to Australia of many years I still cannot fathom the Australian patriotism that surfaces when national citing of Gallipoli is mentioned; as many people know it was a defeat packaged in that over- credited brain of the first lord of the admiralty: Winston Churchill. We all know that his use of Australian troops, among others, in an ill- founded attack at Gallipoli which strategically may have been reasonable but tactilely virtually impossible given where the Allied landing occurred.
With this monumentally futile battle as the background a father returns to the actual battlefield after the war to find the bodies of his three sons who never returned to Australia and their parents. As I wrote at the beginning, this is a film about war but has a minimum of scenes of the warfare elements. It is a film about the search, definitely, but it is also about what he finds in that country so far away with people that are far away from his own parochial patch of farmland on the desert's edge in NSW.
I thought the film was about discovery; the discovery of his missing sons and likewise the discovery, not so much about himself but about a larger world with vastly different people who have their own unique approach to life on this rock. It is a movie of joining and of the realization that we are far closer than the war leaders would like us to understand.