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.
