Review of Tomorrow, When the War Began (2010) by Lorenzo V — 21 Feb 2011

"What does your instincts tell you?

That it's time to go to war.".

When their country is invaded and their families are taken, eight unlikely high school teenagers band together to fight.

REVIEW.

The gaps in logic in this film are glaring as we see scene after scene of exaggerated actions coming into play to force scene conclusions that are supposed to guide the plot dramatically, bridges that should be building audience confidence in their immersion into a relationship with each of the characters as well as with the narrative itself. The author seems to me to be the major part of the failure of this film to deliver anything close to a well-done film project. But that also must include the main production executives who also made the decision to allow an apparently film industry novice to make such important decisions on how to take from a piece of literature the obvious thematic merits that this film so sadly tries to demonstrate to the audience. Things like the struggle for adolescent courage, morality, ethics, etc.. Sometimes what comes to us in words cannot easily be translated into the abstract aspects that reside in film where our eyes can see the process and we interpret what the eye sees and we make decisions concerning the meaning. It was like I was watching a child make decisions about how to go about the intellectual translation process. I found myself getting angrier and angrier at the consistent lack of cohesion between abstract concepts and their concrete imagery that exists in the film because of the lack of understanding about this basic concept taught in film school. It created a terrible embarrassment in me for the people responsible for this project and the characters in the film as they were being turned into puppets where the audience must fill in the gaps of movement imaginatively because of the essential nature of puppeteering where movement cannot flow realistically. Thus we have characters who do things that people living the contexts in which they find themselves would not and should not do realistically because the mind does not flow that way, nor does the body. I have tried to give a review where there are no spoilers and have used "Red Dawn" as my metaphorical device that one can use to compare and contrast what is good and what is bad in a similar plot and in the production process of a similar project. If you want to analyze this film, I suggest watching "Red Dawn" first. I hope this helps, not to make a choice on whether or not to watch this film, but to understand from where its flaws come.