"An innocent family picnic turns existential in Nicolas Roeg's brilliant Walkabout." - Ed Gonzalez

Director Roeg takes the setup of two rich Brit kids engaging in an experience tantamount to an aborigine "walkabout" and uses it not for class condescension of any kind, but for insightful juxtaposition and mesmeric invocations of life and death for an overall movie that suggests -- like John Boorman's equally humanist Emerald Forest -- we aren't so different after all.

Roeg's cinematography is working overtime to make up for some dated effects and overly-symbolic gestures. It doesn't help that this journey is initiated by something completely ridiculous, with only a few facts given later to clarify. I really don't buy the theories people come up with for that. Acting goes from interesting (David Gulpilil in a familiar and much appreciated Aborigine role), to tolerable (young girl), to bland/annoying (young boy). I am unimpressed.

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Journey for a mind and soul. It depends on each viewer individually what they will found and receive from this film. I think most simply won't understand it. But for some it will be as rewarding and important as it is for me.

A great film. It kinda loses steam an hour in, short of the evocative landscape images and sense of immediate threat that pervaded the film shortly before. The film picks up moments later and although Roeg tosses the issue of culture clashes into the ring, I think one has to derive a greater meaning from it. Something à la "home is where you make of it", but that's me, you make of it what you will. Essential viewing.

Good until the final third where it falls apart.

Some fascinating editing choices and juxtapositions going on here. A mesmerizing visual poem that begs to be rewatched.

Be forewarned, there is some intense animal killing in the film. Not for the faint of heart. All in all, it's one of Roeg's best. Simultaneously unsettling to the core and breathtakingly beautiful.

It's a distant film without much structure. It's fairly straightforward, but it's told through images rather than words so it comes across as more profound and nuanced. The editing is the most striking and defining element, and it brilliantly contrasts the two worlds of the film: the natural world of the outback and the man-made urban world. The themes are nothing new but it's quite a unique film.

I guess I'm not much of a Roeg fan.

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Roeg's directing has a drifting, unreal quality, like a damaged dream infesting a sun-baked mind. The relationships carry a gripping weight, even though (perhaps because) they're sketched in with so little dialogue, such a dearth of shared information. Roeg is more interested in the feel of interactions than the details, and he allows things to remain mysterious without becoming so inflated as to become actual mysteries. It is about mood more than incident, and has a burrowing, haunting quality.

Well, it's going to be a while before I eat meat again.

Even the sub-Bond score and dodgy day-for-night photography can't spoil this beautifully shot walk through Australia's eden. Elliptical, symbolic, with something of the sixties about it.

Less than meets the eye. Striking visuals and hallucinogenic editing can't save this from its tedious one-note pace. It's beautiful, but ultimately a bit thin and repetitive.

A film that goes beyond being just a movie... makes you think, wonder, Dream.... long after you've seen it.

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