Was anyone not satisfied with the ending?

I used to be unhappy with the ending, but I feel like I understand it now, and it's really powerful. It's ultimately a story about the two brothers, and I don't much care about Fletcher, myself. Anyway, it seems to me like Charlie realises that it has to stop. "No more". He has to kill Arthur and end the terror and killing. But so too, he IS his brother, and he does not leave him to die alone. Remember what Arthur said earlier: What could be more hollow than to die alone, unloved?

Quite a while since I've seen it but I do recall Cave bragging that he wrote the script in 3 weeks or something, where most screenwriters labour for years. Having found the film unsatisfying in its conclusion I recall thinking, yeah 3 weeks sounds about right.

I think the guy should have shot himself in the end and died with all his brothers.
He was going to be hunted for the rest of his life anyways.

Nah. Killing of all the bad guys would just cheapen the film.

Somebody here has been drinking and I'm sad to say it ain't me - Allan Francis Doyle

In Australia, the governments get away with whatever they want. There has never been an Australian government brought down over brutality or abuse. Corruption has ended a few and sometimes the parties will fight over something but when it's the government against the people, the Australian people always lose.

Eureka Stockade is the most famous rebellion in Australian history and it ended with a massacre of the miners by the Troopers, the rebel flag had bits cut off it as souvenirs by visiting royals for the next hundred years.

In Australia, people like Eden Fletcher always win, they always have. That's why Australians are so disrespectful of authority, it's because they're powerless to do anything else.

The British governors (or whatever Eden was) were sometimes pretty brutal but that was how the British empire was run. Australia was initially a penal colony for criminals who were sentenced to death but whose crime was something like burglery or prostitution. Their death sentences was commuted to transportation.

The British Empire was not a nice place unless you were an aristocrat or maybe middle-class and in the colonies, it was arguably worse.

I thought the same thing at first but I think it fits the mood of the movie, if you see Fletcher is pretty much behind the scenes, and when you think he seems somewhat sympathetic about the aboriginals he suggests they all be killed, then the whipping... the only one who knew he was there were killed or almost killed, so none of the brothers or the gang knew Fletcher had anything to do with it, and it fits the story, the corrupt government/empires use people as pawns in their game, with out getting any blood on them(I loved the scene where hes handed the whip, he basically saying I want it done but I don't want any part of it cause he knows the repercussions) everyone is sacrificed/ killed in order for civilized life to born, all the aboriginals had to be killed so they wouldn't loose any white men in the eyes of Fletcher and majority of the white people.

Yeah you could say Stanley could of told charlie at the end Fletcher made me do it or something, but by then the incident is over. Charlies anger was focused on his older brother, cause none of it would happened if they never killed the family.

For those who claim that it's out of character for Charlie to kill Arthur Burns: You're forgetting one key aspect of the film - Charlie left the gang already. At the beginning of the film we find him in a whore house with his younger brother, it seems to me, because he was trying to escape from the brutality his brother causes with the gang. We're meant to believe, at the beginning, that these events take place just after the brutal rape and murder of the pregnant woman, remember. The way I saw the movie was that Charlie left after this last murder/rape because he had had enough. How it is out of character, then, for him to put a stop to his brother's killing?

I don't want to say "you don't get it," but the whole film is about morality in a place without morals; civilization and justice struggling against the insane violence of an untamed outback. Charlie is not a good person. He's more like a vessel who moves through the story without any real direction, that is, until the end when he finally makes a stand against his brother. Mikey, though an imbecile and a weakling, is a rapist and, perhaps, even a murderer. Charlie even says to Arthur about Mikey, "He worships you." What kind of person worships a monster like Arthur burns, who tortures, rapes, maims, and otherwise brutalizes the innocent without a second thought? I almost see Arthur as a lesser, more human version of the judge from Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. He has absolutely no qualms when it comes to slaying anyone that's not part of his gang, or "family."

But the most powerful aspect of the film is something I think the screenwriter says in the DVD extras. He likes in films when good men are forced into bad situations. That is, Captain Stanley is a good man, yet look at the violence even he ends up causing: The slaughter of the aborigines by his soldiers - women and children included. So, in the end, nobody is innocent, not even Martha, Stanley's wife, who finally becomes acquainted with the violence this place holds when she watches and even encourages Mikey's flogging. What the story ends up asking is, where does justice end and where does pointless slaughter begin, and what's the difference, really? In a sense, Stanley's order to "clear out" the aborigines from the flats is just as awful as Arthur Burns' rape and murder of the civilized people upon whom he preys. Charlie's murder of Arthur at the end is the only real act of heroism in the entire film, though I see Stanley TRYING to do the right thing throughout, but even he comes to realize (or at least is confronted by the fact) that real goodness and virtue cannot last long in such a place (again, emphasis should be put on Martha, whom Stanley tries so hard to shield from the truth).

Anyway, I absolutely love this film, not just for the script, but the cinematography, especially, my favorite part being when Arthur is out on his plateau all night as if he's listening to the night, as if it reveals something to him, or as if he has some claim over the whole land - again, much like the judge in Blood Meridian.

I agree, I thought the ending was fitting regarding the rest of the film. It emphasised the fact that Charlie had already left that life behind and knew that Arthur needed to be stopped.

To those saying that Charlie should have killed Stanley - did you not see the state of Stanley after Arthur had got to him? If he survives that in those conditions it would be rather miraculous. What would be the point of more bloodshed coming from a man who obviously didn't want to have to resort to that?

I actually half expected Charlie to shoot himself, but the fact that he didn't felt fine to me and I liked it because it didn't have that predictability to it.


"You roll over right now...or I'll EAT YOUR PILLOW!"