Tomorrow When The War Began (Review)

Spoilers ahoy!

Originally released in 2010, Tomorrow When the War Began becomes available on DVD and BluRay this week.  In Australia the flick made many millions.  No surprise.  The film adapts the first of a vastly popular book series there by John Marsden.

I haven't read the books.  Now I want to.  Very much.

Many the rough synopsis of the story gives a wrong impression.  Seven teenagers come back from a weekend trip to find their homeland invaded, their parents prisoners of a foreign power, and all seven decide to fight back.  Sounds like Red Dawn, doesn't it?

Actually, its more like Harry Potter.  Sans anything like magic.  A group of young people end up in exactly the right place at the wrong time to make a difference--and do it, making heart-rending decisions in the process.  What could have ended up little more than a video game (Woo-hoo!  Lets Kill Us Some Foreigners!) instead becomes a war drama coupled with a terrible coming of age.  Some one in the audience when I saw it went on about how if she had to kill someone in war it wouldn't bother her at all.  My companion, who served in the Isreali military and knows plenty of war veterans, disagreed.  So did I, not least because of memories involving my own father's nightmares from the second World War.  TWTWB fails--gloriously--to romanticize war even a little bit.  When the central character, Ellie (Caitlin Stasey), kills to save herself and her friends in a real way she never gets over it.  "I've got blood on my hands," she tells the others.  Not that she's weak.  On the contrary!  Ellie rapidly becomes the leader of this little band, in part because she has the courage to not only fight, but also live with the horror of slaughtering human beings.

Also, keep in mind this film avoids anything jingoistic.  The invaders, a Coalition of Nations, remain unspecific (save that they're Asian).  More, while warfare never becomes somehow wonderful, the extreme conditions don't lead to the extreme opposite conditions--nothing akin to Lord of the Flies.  Instead, we watch the reluctant birth of heroes--not bloodthirsty children or mindless killing machines, but warriors who carry a heavy burden but do so well.

Ellie and her best friend Corrie (Rachel Hurd Wood) with Corrie's boyfriend Kevin (Lincoln Lewis) all want to get away for a weekend, out camping in the wilderness.  Joining them are Ellie's next door neighbor Homer (Deniz Akdeniz), along with perpetually chirpy Fi (Phoebe Tonkin), deeply religious Robyn (Ashleigh Cummings) and Lee (Chris Pang), the boy Ellie crushes on.  In a somewhat heavy-handed bit of symbolism/foreboding the area they head for carries the name Hell.  Once there, they all enjoy themselves immensely.  They hardly even notice the low flying jet planes one night.

Until they get back home.

At that point every single character starts a wrenching personal journey.  Every single one ends up forced to look into the mirror of events.  Some like what they find.  Others are appalled.  But that inner struggle remains the heart of the film--not the (three, not terribly grand) battle sequences.  Someone must mature, very quickly.  Someone else must find their courage.  Another struggles with the most deeply held convictions, forced to make the most horrible of choices.

The dialogue's a bit clunky.  One can tell at times this was a full-length book, whittled down to its essence (more shades of Harry Potter).  For American tastes it may seem to start slow.  But I left the theater hoping very very much for a sequel.  I know there are several books.

Growing Up

This marks my entry in the March 2010 Blog Chain.

"Growing Up" derives (or so it seems) from a straightforward fact--namely, that as we get older most of us get taller. But if so, then doesn't such hint at a limitation to the whole idea? Humans generally reach their full height by sometime in their teens, or soon after. In other words, when it comes to "growing up" we...well, stop. Literally, anyway.

Hence my preference for a different phrase. Coming of age.

It feels better, more complete and deeper. To grow up sounds perfunctory, with a focus upon but one aspect of maturity, surely one of the least important. What is height compared to self-control? To understanding?

Countless stories use this process as the heart of the plot. Never mind about efforts to thwart the Dark Lord or win the love of the your life or achieve that event coming up at the end of the tale or solving the crime somewhere near the beginning. Those are surface details. Very often what a plot really consists of is what Robert Heinlein called "The Boy Who Learned Better." One of the frustrating things about nearly every adaptation of Herman Melville's Moby Dick for instance (even sincere ones like the 1950s version penned by Ray Bradbury) is how the films ignore the story of the narrator (who says to call him Ishmael, a different thing from saying such is his name interestingly enough) and how he changes. In the book, he is seeking he-knows-not-what and goes to sea because he knows from experience the soothing impact this has. But once aboard the Pequod, his heart catches fire from the rest of the crew--he hungers to take part in the hunt for whales. Yet later, from the crow's nest, he views a whale calf's birth. He feels the blood lust leave him. Later, alone of all those on board, Ishmael the man who does NOT long to hunt whales, is the sole survivor. Coincidence? Or the whole point in some ways of the story?

Another interesting detail about Moby Dick is that the novel itself is an example of this process. Go and read what Melville wrote before, then read his masterpiece as well as what followed. Seems amazing the same man created both. More, Melville evidently planned his whale novel to be quite different. It changed as his pen put words on paper. Writers know what that is like. Not writing a story so much as transcribing it, describing what we find rather than composing what should go into the work.

My own writing--or coming of age as a writer--echoes this. Not so much the following of my heart, but the learning how to listen then carefully put upon paper what I hear. Craft, yes--but that is almost like learning a software (I would have said driving a car or riding a bicycle, but not knowing how to do either...). Practice until you are proficient, then simply use the skill acquired. Much harder, a far more mature ability (at least in my case) is to swim the river of imagination, barely knowing what lies ahead.

But that is just me. Your experience will be different, at least to some extent. That pesky (glorious) individuality thing, dontcha know...

Participants
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