Wednesday, September 22, 2010

"Tomorrow, When The War Began" Trailer



I've never read the books on which this was based, but it looks really cool.  Unfortunately, no U.S. release date set thus far.  There still hasn't been a U.S. release of the Solomon Kane film either, despite it being based on the stories of an American writer, Robert Howard, so I'm not optimistic.

If it came out here, I would see it.  I haven't read the books (I don't think the entire series has been released in the U.S.), but they're well-reviewed and the series has been extremely successful in Australia and New Zealand.

The invading country still isn't named, but an Australian member of one of my Internet forums said they recognized a J-10 (a Chinese fighter aircraft, one of the most modern) shooting down an Australian F/A-18.  I was under the impression that, in the books, the invading country was Indonesia (something that many Australians used to fear), but in the movie, it's described as being a coalition of countries.

And despite the sheer non-PC-ness of the concept (an Asian nation invading Australia, teenagers becoming insurgents, etc.), I've only seen one criticism of it on those grounds online, which claimed it was a base attempt to appeal to the Australia First Movement.

(According to Wikipedia, AFM was a pro-fascist organization during WWII.  However, some more googling indicates a newer organization by that name that is strongly opposed to non-white immigration.)

I really doubt this movie is racist.  Heck, the trailer features the group's one Asian member, Lee Takkam(Chris Pang) making out with a white girl, who based on the Wikipedia articles, is probably the protagonist Ellie Linton (Caitlin Stacey).  Given how a great deal of racism is fear of "The Other" getting their hands on "our" women (Emmett Till was murdered for whistling at a white woman in the Jim Crow South, for example), it is improbable in the extreme that a movie intended to be racist would depict the female lead's love interest as being non-white.

Heck, that makes it more interesting.  According to TVTropes, Asian male characters never "get the girl," whereas white male characters get with non-white females all the time.  This is a nice subversion of that.

(BTW, the thought processes spinning off this led me to a make one of Andrew's allies who appears later in Escape from the Wastelands father-in-law to a military officer of an indeterminate Asian ethnicity and grandfather of a mixed-race toddler.  Hooray for subverting tropes!)

5 comments:

  1. Only one book came out in the USA? Even in Sweden, the entire series was released - translated, at that!

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  2. I think I might have spoken prematurely, since the Wikipedia indicated another book (possibly the third) having a U.S. release date of 1995.

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  3. blah, how do I follow your blog? blogspot confuses me

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  4. Here's the link to the Help document on the subject:

    http://www.google.com/support/blogger/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=104226

    I think I might get the Follower widget, to make it easier for everyone.

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  5. Interesting - until I heard the Australian accents, I assumed this was the Red Dawn remake. Looks like another Dueling Movies incident might be in the offing.

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