Review of Tomorrow, When the War Began (2010) by Robert L — 29 Dec 2010

The even-more-idiotic-premise Red Dawn remake, in which China invades the US and urban kids fight back, was shelved by MGM's late financial collapse. Luckily, Australia came through with its own high school kids fighting an invasion movie. Similarly enough, the invaders are a coalition comprised of every Pacific Rim nation in spitting distance that isn't New Zealand, Tasmania, or Papua New Guinea. In other words: China and assorted smaller Asian allies. (Not clear in the movie, Japan is an ally of Australia's this time around in the source novels.).

This is a very real and longtime source of Australian paranoia, often pretty racist, apparently, and John Marsden's insanely popular (outside the US, anyway) YA novel series left the invading nation intentionally vague. What works that way in the books, however, is impossible on film, and...they're Asian. And with Goebbels and Darth Vader as tailors, yet - those are some pretty snazzy Bad Guy Army outfits, I must say.

Is the movie any good? It's not bad. I have read the first novel, none of the rest of them, and what makes the novel more than a down-under rip on the original Red Dawn is the characters, more than anything else. They're the usual motley collection of cliches you'd expect, with minor regional differences - the VERY ethnic bad boy who'd be Hispanic in an American movie, he's Greek, is about the extent of it.

There's a Christian girl who's never, ever going to kill anybody (you already know what's coming, there, if you've ever seen a war movie before), a pampered rich girl who brings makeup along to camp out (guess what her heart's really made of, and it ain't silk and champagne, byatch), a coward who finds out he isn't one, really, a stoner. Etc. But Marsden pulls occasionally real and wise observations about teenagers and the ways they relate to each other and adults out of what could be cutouts in lesser hands, which is, I have to assume, a big part of what's made the books so beloved for so long.

Stuart Beattie, the writer/director whose previous resume contains a pile of mostly forgettable Hollywood action fluff is just not up to the task of porting that to film, so the best parts of the novel get short shrift. The young actors are fine, though, and try with what they're given, and the action's nicely done, if often silly, as these things tend to be.

Not bad, like I said, and pretty much has to be better than poor old Red Dawn 2010. The second and third books are in production back-to-back, apparently, and the books are supposed to get a lot less boys-own-adventure and a lot more about how being soldiers ages and maddens these kids, so...it'll be interesting to see how that goes on film. If you're not somebody who grew up loving the books...you could do worse with a couple of hours than Tomorrow, When the War Began, especially if you're at all geeky about invasion paranoia fiction.