TOMORROW, WHEN THE WAR BEGAN review

TOMORROW, WHEN THE WAR BEGAN review

Sep 08

Ostensibly aimed at a relatively young audience, John Marsden’s Tomorrow novels were nevertheless dark, complex, and breathlessly intense – and spoke home truths about human nature to an audience struggling to come to grips with the dark, complex and stressful responsibilities of growing up.

The movie adaptation, penned and helmed by Stuart Beattie (one of those Aussies-in-Hollywood who’s scripted such mixed projects as Pirates Of The Caribbean [the first one], Collateral, 30 Days Of Night, and Australia), doesn’t nail all of the elements that made the books so special, but gets enough of them right to warrant lukewarm encouragement, if not outright praise.

Much effort is invested (in the film) in lending the characters and situation a sense of realism and sympathy. Many of these efforts just don’t play right. Protagonist Ellie’s disembodied voiceover is intrusive and superfluous; the talking-to-the-camera bookends feel like a failed attempt to carry some of the novel’s first person perspective over into the film; and a lot of the character-based jokes and gags hit the screen with all the pomp and circumstance of wet cardboard.

Even worse, the performances are mixed. Where the actors playing protag Ellie, anti-hero Homer, and beauty-queen Fiona (Caitlin Stasy, Deniz Akdeniz and Phoebe Tonkin respectively) are solid as a rock, the others (played by Rachel Hurd-Wood, Lincoln Lewis, Chris Pang, Ashleigh Cummings and Andy Ryan) are clearly struggling to inject life into flat line-readings, and get no help from debut director Beattie.

This problem is exacerbated by the fact that we’ve (that is, Australians) all grown up on a steady diet of Hollywood fluff, and have come to equate American accents with seriousness – or, at least, a veneer of seriousness (kind of like the way professional wrestlers are stacked like bodybuilders, but would go down after two seconds in the ring with a tae kwon do black belt) – and we read local, familiar, reassuring accents as calming and laid-back.

In an Aussie production like this, it’s hard to tell whether the source of a performance’s weakness is the actor, the director, or the accent itself. I don’t know what the way out of this predicament is, and neither does Tomorrow. As Ellie says in the film (about something completely different), it ultimately boils down to instinct. Do the performances feel real? In this case the answer is ‘yes, but not often enough.’

Action scenes aren’t something Australian filmmakers are generally known for, but in Tomorrow the action scenes work just fine. The explosions are big and cathartic, the chase scenes are loud and intelligible, the stakes are all laid out in impressive scope – and all this working with a budget a quarter the size of the average American equivalent.

The production is watertight. While some scenes are too desaturated, and much of the soundtrack’s pop music is naff, the sound design, cinematography, stunts and production design are world class.

The same can’t be said for the film’s pacing. The first hour trickles by at a snail’s pace, and so much slack piles up that the climactic third act struggles to pull it taut in time. This is a fairly big departure from the novel’s whiplash pace and mounting sense of escalation. While the film has a lot of expository ground to cover, it should have covered it more efficiently, leaving the final act with more room to breathe.

Another gripe I have with the film is the schizophrenic way it treats the audience. Some things – specifically, the characters’ individual emotional journeys – are treated with suitable subtlety, and play extremely well. Other things are repeated and enlarged and underlined and bashed over the audience’s head for no reason – “hey, look, a bridge. I bet that bridge is important. Look at them using that bridge! What can we do with that bridge, I wonder?” – and it all comes to a head in a handful of nauseating dialogue scenes complete with lines like “We thought we were safe. That turned out to be the BIGGEST FAIRYTALE OF ALL!” and “[being shot feels] like someone’s pulling barbed wire through you.” Nobody talks like that, Australian or otherwise, and for every line of dialogue Beattie gets right, there are two that fall flat.

Professional dollar priests have predicted that Tomorrow will rake in around US$15 million when it’s released over there. Put that together with its current takings here (AU$4m and climbing) and it’ll probably make its budget back – just. But why should the reception be so lukewarm over there? Do American audiences scoff as much at Aussie accents in serious situations as we do?

A big blow against the film’s financial prospects is the characters. The main character’s a girl – ew! – and she falls in love with an Asiatic bloke – gross! There are too many girls in the main cast (4 out of 7? They’ll want the vote next!), and none of the characters fit into the cookie-cutter stereotypes we’ve spent our entire lives cultivating in our minds (the pretty one is also the smart one? The greasy Mediterranean chap is the heroic one? The jock is a coward? What?).

Tomorrow, When The War Began (the film) is merely competent. Its source material, however, burns so bright that its light glows through the film’s mediocrity. The slack pace, the awkward performances, the superfluous voiceover – the film has its flaws. But the bits it gets right – the ethical arguments, the character beats, and the ever-escalating set-pieces – makes it a damn sight better than the average Hollywood explode-a-thon playing in the adjacent cinema.

A flawed beginning, then, to a promising franchise.