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Category:    Home > Reviews > TV Mini-Series > Australian > Snowy (Australian Mini-Series)

Snowy (TV mini-series)

 

Picture: C+     Sound: C+     Extras: B-     Episodes: B-

 

 

Australia has much television that has not made it to the states, including mini-series like Snowy (1993), which attempts to bring to life the 1949 attempt to tame the wild at Snowy River with a damn.  When this works, the previously inaccessible area becomes quite accessible.  The current residents are not quite ready for this, and that is where the drama begins.

 

Unfortunately, it becomes a soap opera and drawn-out melodrama, not the more serious examination of an historical Australian event as Phillip Noyce’s recent Rabbit Proof Fence was.  Being a more commercial enterprise for Australian TV, it decided to play it safe.  The acting is not bad, but the co-directed shows by Paul Moloney and Ian Gilmour could have taken place almost any time, as the history is relegated too much to the background.  Roger Simpson is responsible for the writing, which may cohere well, but never manages to go beyond its many standard restrains of storytelling.

 

The full frame image shows its age, being from a TV master from its release year a decade ago, but cinematographer Brett Anderson, A.C.S., only got so much out of the camera.  Color can be good, but is a bit muted throughout, though some of that is absolutely intentional to capture the time.  The Dolby Digital 2.0 is a simple stereo at best, articulate, due in part enough to its recent vintage.  The music score by Michael Atkinson and Michael Easton is just too much, often filled with the self-importance of a bad Hollywood epic mess.  It inadvertently feels like a knock-off of Bill Conti’s theme song for the U.S. camp classic soap opera Dynasty.

 

Extras include the bio/filmographies of cast and crew, production notes, trivia on the Snowy Mountains, all text and all of which are informative.  Best of all is The Snowy – A Dream of Growing Up – The Building of the Snowy Mountains.  This hour-long program is actually more interesting than the mini-series and it is a shame we did not have more of this kind of material in it.  Too bad it was not longer.

 

One last point.  In the final chapter, a movie theater is playing film a widescreen 1.75 X 1 aspect ratio.  Though the series covers a few years, it lands up in the early 1950s and I doubt widescreen reached Australia that soon.  Certainly, they did not have newsreels at that ratio, and the films on the posters do not qualify either.  It echoes a lack of authenticity that runs throughout the mini-series.  This is only for the most interested viewer.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo


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