Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 64% (Critics) / 61% (Audience)
Directed By: Stuart Beattie
Written By: Stuart Beattie
Starring: Caitlin Stasey, Rachel Hurd-Wood, Lincoln Lewis and Phoebe Tonkin
Studio: Freestyle Releasing

Synopsis:Seven Australian teenage friends from a small town go on a camping trip to be with nature. During their trip, they see military aircraft fly overhead. What they didn’t know was their country was being invaded by another country. Returning home, they discover that they are at war. With no training, they band together to fight the enemy. (Source)

The Good:
Stuart Beattie deserves props for creating slick, visually engaging and suspenseful action sequences on what had to be a limited budget and using a cast of young actors. And the actors all gave good performances with Caitlin Stasey being a standout as the de facto leader of this teenage militia. She is a very pretty young woman with a nice edge to her but who also was able to pull off the awkward feelings that a teenage girl would have when dealing with a boy she really liked.
And just a big thumbs up this movie for having the lead be a woman especially when there were a couple make actors in the cast that were playing roles that would have been immediately placed in the leadership position in other films of this type.

The Bad:
I really was annoyed by the way this movie took great pains not to just come out and say which Far East Asian country had invaded. It was either North Korea or China obviously so why not name names and stop being coy with the identity of the invaders?

The Ugly:
The main objective of the teenage rebels was to blow up a bridge to stop supplies coming in but couldn’t the enemy army just fly their supplies in? They did fly to Australia and take over a chunk of the country…I would think getting a couple cargo planes together to make supply runs would be easy as 1-2-3.

Final Verdict: The movie that the RED DAWN remake of last year should have been, TOMORROW WHEN THE WAR BEGAN takes the teen rebels fighting back against an invading army and instills in it a good deal of heart and believable characters so that the viewer becomes invested in them and worries about their safety. And getting me to care about characters in a movie like this is a successful achievement.

Rating: B