Sightlines · reception
How Gallipoli was received
1981 · Peter Weir · Gallipoli on Sightlines
The arc
An instant landmark on release — it swept the 1981 AFI Awards and was hailed as the crowning film of the Australian New Wave. Forty years on it hasn't needed a reappraisal: it's still the film Australians mean when they say 'our national cinema'.
What’s debated
The perennial fight is over its history: the film pins the doomed charge at the Nek on tea-sipping British commanders, when the fatal orders actually came from Australian officers — accuracy sticklers have been relitigating that ever since.
Its footprint
'What are your legs? Steel springs.' is quoted by Australian runners and coaches to this day, and the freeze-frame final shot is one of the most famous endings in cinema — endlessly referenced whenever people list gut-punch closing images.
Where it stands
A stone-cold Australian canon film and Anzac Day perennial — the 'you must have seen this' entry point to the Australian New Wave, and the Mel Gibson performance cinephiles point to from before Hollywood claimed him.
Did you know? The film was bankrolled by Rupert Murdoch and Robert Stigwood's R&R Films — a personal project for Murdoch, whose father Keith Murdoch was the WWI correspondent whose famous 'Gallipoli letter' helped expose the campaign's disaster.