Tomorrow When The War Began

Director: Stuart Beattie

Starring: Caitlin Stasey, Lincoln Lewis, Deniz Akdeniz, Rachel Hurd-Wood, Phoebe Tonkin, Chris Pang, Ashleigh Cummings, Andy Ryan.

Reviewed By Nolan Giles.

Imagine you’re eighteen, you’ve just been on a camping trip with you’re mates and you come home to find your dog dead, and your family locked up in a POW camp. This is the dilemma faced by Ellie (Caitlin Stasey) and her fittingly diverse group of Australian friends, who return from the wilderness to discover their peaceful home overrun by ruthless invaders in Tomorrow When The War Began. Many of us are already aware of the fanciful adventure due to the popularity of the original John Marsden teen novel in the nineties. For those who aren’t, basically the kids take a very ‘Home Alone’ attitude to the situation, but instead of making booby traps with marbles and glue, they tend to blow the intruders up with makeshift bombs and destroy bridges with stolen oil tankers.

The man set to the task of bringing these well-turned pages to the big screen is Stuart Beattie who makes his directorial debut after a slew of successful screenplays.  Despite it’s M rating, TMTWB is definitely not a kid’s movie, and Beattie makes this very clear early on where a protesting prisoner gets his face blown off by a very agitated general. It is edge-of-seat moments like this that really make TMWTB an entertaining film with the director building heightened suspense in numerous frantic cat and mouse moments. The pacing throughout is slick and well suited to this older teen brand of film, with the action not interfering with the dialogue and vice-versa. Beattie is given a fairly decent budget to throw around and he uses it ambitiously, clearly utilising the skills he has garnered as a big-time writer in conjunction with his directing. The smooth production shimmers with the Hollywood glitz that adorned his scripted movies such as Pirates of the Caribbean, Australia and Collateral.

With the franchising possibilities of a seven book series Beattie wants this to go global, but the Australian teen niche and a lackluster cast may hold TWTWB back. Strip away the blockbuster sheen and concentrate on the characters and dialogue and you are left with a particularly exciting episode of Neighbors. You’ve got your typical jock, stoner, church girl, hot bimbo, and Italian bad boy all contesting their adolescent dominance on screen. The young actors tend to drown in the deep-end as their characters try to reflect the more emotionally complex aspects of being thrown into a warzone. Caitlin Stasey has the particularly difficult job of stepping straight from the Neighbours set into Australia’s attempt at a Harry Potter-style franchise in her portrayal of Ellie. Easy on the eyes and clearly dedicated to the role, she manages to fill these shoes better than the others, wielding an AK-47 with the reckless exuberance of a young woman who has clearly lost it all.

With themes of guilt, death, betrayal and retaliation this movies offers a lot more emotional depth than your average teen movie. At the end of the day however, it still is a teen movie and some naive acting and scriptwriting clearly define its pubescent flaws. What makes this movie a hit however, are the explosive chases and battles, which are contrasted perfectly against a cracking Australian soundtrack, Australian humour and some lovely character eye-candy. The ambitiousness of Stuart Beattie’s first outing as a director demonstrates that if he continues to make progress, this movie franchise could certainly become Australia’s most successful yet.

Tomorrow When The War Began in cinemas 2 September.

ENDS