Sydney Impressive'. 'Outstanding'. 'Rousing and passionate'. 'A sunburnt spectacular'. To the list of superlatives being showered on Baz Luhrmann's outback movie epic, Australia, should perhaps be added just one more: shameless. Never before has so much been written about - and promised by - an Australian film. One wit called the frenetic publicity campaign a 'hurricane of hype'. In addition to the normal hoopla surrounding the release of a major motion picture, Australia is also spearheading a glossy and nakedly jingoistic marketing campaign designed to lure visitors; nothing of this scale has been attempted since Paul Hogan famously promised to slip 'another shrimp on the barbie' in the 1980s. The Luhrmann juggernaut swept into Sydney with a red-carpet spectacular that paralysed much of the city and, sadly, had a similar effect on the country's film critics, who happily tore the A$130 million (HK$651 million) movie into tiny shreds. 'Watching this is like being hit over the head by a giant glitter-coated marshmallow,' fumed Rob Lowing in The Sun-Herald. The Sydney Morning Herald's Sandra Hall dismissed the dust and jodhpur melodrama as 'deliriously camp and shamelessly overdone', while Jim Schembri delivered the coup de grace in The Age, calling Luhrmann's 165-minute masterwork an 'oversized, overlong outback weepie'. Shot on location in Sydney, far north Queensland and the remote Kimberley region, the sweeping tale of an English aristocrat (Nicole Kidman) who teams up with rough-hewn cowboy (Hugh Jackman) to take on an evil cattle baron, Australia seems like the perfect antidote to the financial gloom. The director has said all along that he wanted to make an escapist, feel-good romance in the tradition of Gone With the Wind, Out of Africa and The African Queen. Although the country's critics have pilloried its blend of romance, action and sentimentality, Luhrmann says Australia is a movie with a timeless, universal appeal. 'I wanted to make a film that everyone could go and see,' he said. 'One of those old-fashioned movies.' Outsiders will no doubt wonder why Luhrmann and his wife Catherine Martin have attracted so much bile from their own countrymen. The couple are not only successful filmmakers (Moulin Rouge, Romeo + Juliet and Strictly Ballroom were all commercial hits), they also choose to work in Sydney rather than move to the US. What seems to have offended Australia's chattering classes most, though, is the fact it deliberately manipulates national myths and stereotypes to appeal to a mostly American and British audience. The fact Luhrmann has used Chips Rafferty and Steve Irwin as his models of Aussie masculinity has offended those city types who see themselves as more urbane, tolerant and well-travelled. The director seems to have been more successful in his depiction of Australian Aborigines. The casting of Brandon Walters, an unknown child actor, to play a mixed-race boy adopted by Lady Sarah Ashley (Kidman) has won universal praise, as has his willingness to examine black-white relationships. Whatever the detractors say, it is hard to recall such a self-consciously Australian movie generating this level of interest and debate. Ordinary filmgoers will make their own judgment when Australia is released this week. Either way, Luhrmann has given us, to quote Peter Pan, 'an awfully big adventure'.