What an appropriate title for a film that is as interesting as listening to someone you meet at a bus stop tell you what they dreamed of last night.
For starters let's talk about production quality. The first 25 minutes of the film appear to be dubbed by the same company that does the voice overs for all those bad martial arts movies. The loop was so bad that we at first couldn't establish that it really was Kim Basinger doing her own lines. The film quality and the sound give the impression of a made-for-TV-movie cira 1983. There are no less than six jarring horrid cuts between scenes. They are so abrupt that people in the theater actually thought there was a problem with the projectioner.
Moving on.
I Dreamed of Africa is a movie about a ridiculously wealthy divorcee who moves to Kenya with her young son and her new husband not long after surviving a horrible car crash. They buy a ranch/farm and Kuki then spends the next few years fixing the place up and adjusting to the rigors of Africa while her husband goes off hunting.
We know that the husband likes Africa because he thrives on the danger of hunting big game---although he is violently and passionately opposed to poaching. We never understand why Kuki likes it though. All she ever does is slave away---mostly alone----trying to make something of their farm in the face of hostile elements, natives and the occasional lion.
They make a big deal about life in Africa having "a different rhythm" apparently this is so you won't bitch about being constantly surprised by how much time has passed and how little has happened. Basinger's appearance never changes and the only way that we know more than ten years have passed by the end of the film is because she says out loud that her son is 17 years old.
There are plenty of other people around---Kenyan natives who work as servants for Kuki, other Anglo-Europeans with tons of money who have also decided it's "the thing to do" to move to Africa and buy a farm, some "outback" adventurer types that the husband goes off hunting with---but we have no relationships with any of them. Kuki's mother comes out occasionally to disapprove of the life that she's chosen to lead, but there's never much to these arguments. I think there are likely less than 15 pages of dialogue in the whole film.
What we get is a look into the life of a woman that most people cannot relate to-----how many folks do you know rich enough to just up and move to Africa to run a farm just to assuage their boredom? We learn nothing about Africa except that it has wild animals and some beautiful countryside. We learn nothing about the people who live there or the government or the real hardships----oh, okay, there are lions sometimes and the occasional elephant that will get into your garden and sometimes the weather is freaky. Mostly what we learn is that Kim Basinger looks great in tailored linen clothes.
After you've sat through the whole thing just before the credits role you get four lines about how Kuki still lives in Kenya on her farm with her daughter---born during the course of the film---- and is now considered one of the great conservationists of our time.
How come we didn't get to see any of that? THAT would be an interesting story. What we get is two hours of not very interesting prequel.
