Screen Machine

Review: Tomorrow When the War Began

Based on the first of John Marsden’s ‘beloved’ teenage fiction novels, Tomorrow When the War Began is glossy and appealing in the most ambivalent and moronic fashion. A group of rural teens go bush to escape their town’s annual show weekend. They pash, splash and connect with nature and each other. When they head home, the kids discover the whole town has been captured and rounded up in the showgrounds by Asian invaders: mean, militant and ready to possess Australia. The kids have to grow up really fast and fight the good fight to protect themselves and their beloved country.

When addressing this film, it is difficult to escape the glaring fact of the unspecified “Asian” invaders. There has been a fair bit of literary criticism about the way Marsden’s novels slip quite comfortably into similar tropes, themes and plots in a long tradition of Australian invasion fiction. The critics state that Marsden’s novels, popular as they are, are feeding a new generation of White Australia ideology and anxieties about a natural and rightful belonging to nation and place. Read psychoanalytically, they are paranoid projections about Australia’s own history of invasion, international military activities and harsh local border protection measures.

When questioned about the identity of the invaders, Marsden refuses to specify who they are, an approach that has generally given him a free pass from being labelled racist. More telling is the absence in his novels of the paradox of the British invasion of Australia and dispossession of Indigenous people. He throws a token Greek kid and a token Asian kid in the mix – but where’s the token Aboriginal kid telling the others to get some perspective?

"Hi, we need a token asian guy..."

In this filmic adaptation, director Stuart Beattie (screenwriter for the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, Collateral and Australia! so no stranger to slick, market-driven big budget filmmaking) acknowledges the British invasion when the protagonist, Ellie, notices an advertisement depicting Captain Cook on the beach, with two noble savages emerging from the bush with their spears. Her gaze lingers on the image long enough for Beattie to make the point that there is a paradox of invasion that has just occurred to Ellie. But this moment is negated by contradictions; when the kids first go to ‘Hell’, as they have named the beautiful Eden in the bush they visit at the start of the film, they all exclaim in turns that their’s must be the first eyes to ever see this place. Much like the Kelly Gang in Gregor Jordan’s Ned Kelly, they connect to the land, become indigenous to it, and are thus set up as those who know the landscape best when the foreign invaders (or the British cops, in the case of Ned Kelly) confront them with the choice to fight back or be captured.

Like Marsden, Beattie evades questions in interviews about the subtext of invasion narratives and their connection to nationalism, claiming it is not what the story is about. Ironically, he does say in an interview with Luke Buckmaster:

…It was always a very Australian story with very Australian characters…I’m proud of this country and proud of our ancestry and I wanted it to be as Australian as possible…I was very adamant about keeping everything as Australian as possible.

So that explains the repeated shots of Aussie flags waving proudly throughout the film. But if, as both Beattie and Marsden assure us, we are not to be perturbed about the politics of identity or nationalism in TWTWB, what should we be focussing on? Marsden insists that he wrote the story for the kids because he wanted to show that the yoof of today are not soft and wouldn’t fall apart if their innocence and privilege were to be challenged by a war. It’s a ‘what if’ scenario, common in teenage or young adult fiction, that explores how children would behave in a world without adults.

In an interview on Radio National’s Movie Time, Beattie implies that he gets around the moral quandaries of violence by making it constantly clear that the kids don’t want to be in this situation, that they are reluctant heroes. Ellie is a brave girl with a gun, who kills and suffers immense guilt for it. Using her rural skills, she blows up a lawn mower with a rolled-up singlet and petrol, obliterating some advancing soldiers. Looking down on the dead body of an invading soldier, her voiceover – completely inconsistent with the narrative flow – laments something along the lines of “she was not much older than me. I’ll never forget her face.” But these brief ruminations are completely overwhelmed by long, in-your-face action sequences where cars crash and shit blows up, presumably with people inside them (I get the feeling audiences love finally getting a taste of this kind of Hollywood action glamour in a humble Aussie film.)

Beattie justifies the vision of his characters’ ‘baptism by fire’ as something many children around the world suffer when they are forced into violence. It’s a fact of life, he says. But surely children and adults alike can only really be convinced to fight back, to kill and maim, if they believe in what they are fighting for on some ideological level? I think it all comes back to this nationalistic element that both Marsden and Beattie keep evading for the sake of political correctness.

American invasion films like Red Dawn (both the 1984 original and the 2011 remake) and Invasion USA wear their racism, political conservatism, paranoid projections and violent fantasies on their sleeves. On the other hand, films like Dawn of the Dead (both versions) and Children of Men explore dystopian futures and the loss of innocence in highly conceptual, allegorical ways. For all its bling and earnestness, or because of it, TWTWB is a seriously disappointing film; insidious, evasive and ambivalent.

Maggie Scott just finished her first feature screenplay and writes eclectically about pretty much anything to do with the arts because she has a big gap in her knowledge of science.

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