Bob Ellis’ Rough Cut: Tomorrow, When the War Began
Bob Ellis on Tomorrow, When the War Began, Me and Orson Welles, The Ghost Writer, The Special Relationship, The Kids are Allright, South Solitary and The Disappearance of Alice Creed.
A good title; young people; great scenery; war and rescue; love in the forest; tank battles, helicopter-gunship strikes and coming of age; will this mix of things succeed commercially? How could it not?
Tomorrow When The War Began has elements of Stand By Me, Spartacus, Bridge On The River Kwai, Gone With The Wind and Schindler’s List plus Wolf Creek’s beginning, a holiday gone heinously wrong, and it shows like Mad Max and Romper Stomper that fiction is worth trying in Australia. For too long we have worthily shown that adolescent memoir, ancient murder headlines, vampires, outback pioneering, urban misery, feral pigs and race relations do not draw audiences into multiplexes though working class comedies do. To this we can anyway now, at last, add teenage adventure, Enid-Blyton-with-deadly-weapons, and dishy adolescents repelling heathen invaders by seat-of-the-pants ingenuity, car theft, mechanical nous and the incendiary power of petrol.
I shouldn’t say much more than this. The spunky young actors are all pretty much astonishing: Greek-Australian, Chinese-Australian, black Irish, green-eyed redhead, snobby blonde, male bimbo, pothead and freckled pious pubescent, they would all of them scrub up well in a local Sex and the City. The explosions are very classy; the interior farmhouse designs world standard; Dungog has never looked more blitzed. A sequel seems likely, the writer-director Stuart Beattie an emerging young genius. Rejoice, I say unto you rejoice, and lemonade all round.
