Review of Tomorrow, When the War Began (2010) by Phil K — 04 Jan 2011

A strong contender for the worst movie of 2011 (that I've seen in 2011 anyway).

I remember attempting to read the books when they were prescribed to me in high school. The premise of the film is very exciting to me personally, however I found myself hating all of the characters, probably because I couldn't relate to their idiocy.

Ten or so years on, I find myself hating the movie for much more tangible reasons. The acting for the most part, is abysmal, and only redeemed by Deniz Akdeniz's performance as "Stereotypical Greek Badboy", and an expectedly solid cameo from the highly underrated Colin Friels. The performances by the other cliche teenage archetypes such as "Fiesty Country Girl" and "Curious Foreign Guy" are painful to watch. A few speeches by these two characters actually remind me of lines from films such as Independence Day, however the movie doesn't appear to have a sense of humor about itself, and is lacking actors like Bill Pullman to pull off the dialogue with sufficient cheese.

The rest of the script isn't much better, which is surprising considering it was written by the same guy who penned the script for Pirates of the Caribbean and Collateral. Perhaps he was hamstrung by a desire to be faithful to the books, and transfer as much dialogue as possible from the book to the screen. Regardless of what happened, the dialogue is awful, and anyone who finds it believable needs to go to the pub and find out how human beings actually speak.

This brings me to another point about the characters. I think the big issue is that the characters are teenagers, and have been created by someone much older. It would take an extremely insightful writer to create believable characters, decades their junior. I've heard people praise John Marsden for having incredible insights into teenagers insecurities, but I personally don't see it. Even when I was 14 or 15 (years younger than the characters in the book) I found myself marveling at their stupidity.

I understand that it's a common literary practice to keep characters in a novel just a little bit more in the dark than the reader. It allows the reader to feel good about themselves when they work things out quicker than the main characters do. Arthur Conan Doyle does this to great effect with the character of Watson in the Sherlock Holmes novels. Watson is a pretty switched on guy, however the reader (provided they are of a moderate intelligence) is often able to figure things out right before he does. The genius of Doyle's writing is that he combats the possible frustration that may arise from the reader figuring everything out before Watson, by adding complex plot twists, and a character that thoroughly knows the score - Sherlock Holmes.

Tomorrow When the War Began has a few fleeting moments where you almost believe that some characters have their heads on straight, but then the characters take it way too far, such as in a scene where the fiesty country girl finds another character asleep while he was meant to be keeping watch. She starts out alright by showing she's aware of the danger they are in, and how "shit just got real" but then goes nuts, suggesting the guy who was on watch may as well just shoot her then and there. She goes even further overboard by yelling at him and coaxing him into shooting her, then she takes the gun, and threatens to shoot him, citing the penalty of death for soldiers who fell asleep at their posts during times of war. I imagine this is meant to highlight the mental pressure the kids are under, and the psychological impact she is experiencing after she killed some soldiers earlier in the movie, but the prior character development and way in which she delivers the lines is just so poor, that I got no sense of this mental fatigue at all. I just laughed instead.

Alright, I wasted enough time on this movie last night, I'm not going to make it worse by talking about the plot holes in this movie, which are gaping and numerous.