Tomorrow when the War Began

Having not read John Marsden’s 1993 novel, Tomorrow, When The War Began I had nothing but the trailer to whet my appetite for this film, and the trailer was very reminiscent of the 1984 film Red Dawn, one of my favourite film of that year. So it was with some degree of anticipation that I slipped the BluRay into my PS3 and sat back to enjoy what I was thinking would be a modern day Australian Red Dawn.

Of course, in the same way that Red Dawn was nothing like Kevin Reynolds original script Ten Soldiers, so Tomorrow was nothing like Red Dawn. Sure there were similarities between the two, but rather than tell the whole story, Tomorrow seems content to set up the beginning of a great yarn. It is of course based on the first book of seven, so hopefully we’ll be seeing the rest of the series over the next few years.

Because this tale of a group of high school students who decide to go bush for a week, only to return to find out that their parents are missing and the town has been taken over by an invading force is only the set up for the series, it doesn’t contain as much action as I had been expecting. It’s a story more about the motley group of high school students who find themselves fighting a guerrilla war, than the war itself. 

The attraction of the film, and the strength of the story is in how these teenagers find their purpose in this new world order that has been forced upon them, and how who they used to be effects the decisions and actions they take now.

In the set up – the camping trip into the bush we discover who these teens are and make snap judgments based on how little we know about them, only to be proved wrong by the end of the film, as they each grow in different ways.

I guess in essence it’s more a coming of age story than the explosive action film that the title may ambiguously imply.

FILMGUIDE rating:

Reviewed by: Jonathan