Nobody is enthusiastic. The reviews settle between mixed and poor, and the kindest of them stop at calling the film engaging. Where praise exists it goes to the look of the thing: the panoramic photography and the spectacle of the land rush are singled out more than once, and several critics grant it a pleasing momentum even when they doubt there is much underneath. The sense of an old-fashioned studio epic, done with gloss and some swagger, runs through most of the notices.
The complaints are about everything that is not scenery. The film is called shallow, leisurely and short of dramatic urgency, its dialogue flat, its characters borrowed, its plot overstuffed with familiar material. The spread is narrow: the harshest notice, from the Guardian, dismisses it as cliché piled on cliché, while Empire alone finds the melodrama assured enough to carry the evening. Two of the seven are only partly readable and give no verdict.