The main theme for Gallipoli is Albinoni's "Adagio for Strings and Organ", a perfect choice of music, its sorrowful mood perfect for the scenes leading up to film's climax. It's also put to good use in the film's best transition: although not as audacious as the bone-to-ship cut in 2001, em>Gallipoli jumps from a ball for officers, complete with confetti and streamers, to boats full of troops appearing out of the mist. "Adagio" becomes the soundtrack for young men being shuttled off to die.

Weir switches to electronic music by Jean Michel Jarre for most of the scenes in which the two main characters run. Although it may seem anachronistic for a film set in 1915, the music was an original choice and despite sounding primitive by today's standards, it still sounds unique (mostly due to that style rarely being used in film).

*SPOILERS AHEAD*

But the most important and powerful part of the film is the last fifteen minutes. Everything has been leading up to this disastrous event, when wave after wave of young men are sent to certain death, mowed down by Turkish machine guns. The first wave of Australian solders leaving the trenches is not shown; instead, we get a shot of Archy and Frank, standing in a makeshift graveyard at dusk, listening to the whistle signifying the charge being replaced by nothing but an endless stream of machine gun fire. The next two waves are handled in a straightforward fashion, Weir allowing the tragic images to speak for themselves: soldiers are cut down even as soon as they emerge from the trenches. Very little gore is used, though it isn't necessary; few films have conveyed the simple wastefulness of war as powerfully as em>Gallipoli.

The scenes involving the final wave are the most poignant, not least because Archy is a part of it (Frank is let off the hook when he becomes a messenger runner once the phone lines go down). We watch as men, now fully aware of what awaits them, say goodbye to each other and (via letters) to their families. It seems mad that these men would basically throw their lives away, but this was a different time, when the notions they held made refusal unlikely, notions that are at once both admirable and foolhardy. The scene culminates in a freeze frame of Archy in no-man's-land, and it's easily one of greatest final shots in movie history.