You know how it is, you and your teenage mates head off for a spot of camping in the rural outback, nibbling on Tim Tams and spooning Vegemite into your gob, telling each other you’ll be friends forever and to never change. Then, just as you’re growing weary of the bogans at the billabong and are ready to return home, an unspecified pan-Asian aggressor comes swooping in, rounds everyone up and usurps the nation’s sovereignty in a colonising coup d’état. Struth. Such is the perilous situation facing our seven beleaguered youths, as they’re forced to enter guerilla warfare in this directorial debut of Aussie screenwriter Stuart Beattie.
Based on the series of teen-lit novels by John Marsden, there is a strong sense of this being somewhat of a Red Dawn down under, and on the balance of adolescent action movies, Tomorrow, when the War Began is a considerably better film than its American cousin. Hardly surprising, given that Beattie is the scribe behind some of the top-grossing films of the last ten years, having lent his talents to the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, Collateral and the forthcoming Halo transition from Xbox to silver screen. The film sounds like a typical school-holidays’ cinematic junket, but rises above this, never taking itself too seriously. Certainly, it does not neglect its, or Marsden’s series’, core audience, but it doesn’t entirely pander to every teenybopper trope either. To that, there are jokes about sex, gossip and cannabis, but peppered throughout with violence and death, morality and survivalism.
The young cast is made up of impossibly good-looking sheilas and robustly buff blokes, most of whom come straight from Summer Bay by way of Ramsay St., but who handle their roles reasonably well. In a sense, their development is the weakest aspect of Beattie’s script, each one of them serving a stereotypical purpose (resourceful-but-guilt-ridden-leader-girl, I-can’t-be-tamed-delinquent, comic-relief-stoner, dumb-blonde-who-fills-her-bikini-well, etc.), but the actors are all suitably energetic and game to carry it off. The idea that they would, or even could form a credible résistance, however, is considerably better explored, with the opening 20-minutes showing that these are country kids, used to driving and shooting, and not afraid to bend the rules to get what they want. That they somehow seem to become a bunch of expertly trained hooroo-shouting jarheads is a tad overreaching, though.
The biggest problem the film faces, however, is the enemy facing off with the heroes. Red Dawn had the luxury of a fear-mongering Cold War, but much like the forthcoming remake of the classic American teen flick, in PC circles where cultural insensitivity means reduced profits, we never learn who the kids are fighting. Even the language they speak is a computer-engineered Eastern gobbledygook (no racial pun intended), but this means the enemy is faceless and meaningless, and it’s harder to root against them when they’re merely indifferent to begin with.
Tomorrow, when the War Began is good fun, and marks a fair dinkum beginning of a new series of youthful adventures, even if it did nearly kill me.
3 Likes.
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