Tomorrow, When the War Began - Film

YouTube came up trumps again last night with a film to watch while the wife had control of the remote control. I have seen ‘Tomorrow, When the War Began’ a while ago so finding a full copy on YouTube and free, what a result.

What we have here is an Australian version of the film Red Dawn. If you haven’t seen the American version it is about a group of high school kids who former a guerrilla resistance group calling themselves Wolverines, after their high school mascot. Cuban and Russian troops somehow manage to invade America and with most of the country now under their control the war had cooled. The left the resistance in the shape of the Wolverines to fight on. While in a later remake, the enemy was North Korean with a hint of Russian involvement.

In Tomorrow When the War Began the enemy are nameless (though unmistakably, Asian) who were probably Chinese or North Korean. It follows the same template of Red Dawn, group of small-town youths who are on a camping trip in a valley called Hell and the first inkling of trouble back home is the sound of planes in the night. When they return home from their camping trip everyone has been rounded up and detain at the local fairground.

At the fairground, some of the group witness several atrocities, when they are spotted they are shot at and return to their hideout. They are soon found by searching helicopters and barely escape with their lives when the group decide to go back to their old campsite in Hell. From there they fight back with plans to blow up the bridge into town after finding out the bridge was one of the main supply routes.

To blow the bridge they steal a tanker truck of fuel beneath the bridge and the whole operation is nearly a failure when they are discover but a unexpected member of the group comes to the rescue.

It also differs from both Red Dawns because the main lead character is a girl and she is the leader of the group. After no signs of the promised sequel, it is bursting back on the small screen as a TV series sometime next year in Australia.