Sean O'Hara

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Directed by Stuart Beattie and starring no one you've ever heard of unless you live in Australia.

A group of Australian teens go on a camping trip to an isolated part of the Outback known locally as Hell. When they return home, they find their families missing and the town eerily deserted. They quickly discover that the country's been invaded by *mumble* and all the locals placed in internment camps. The teens grab all the guns and supplies they can find and head back to Hell to set up a guerrilla base from which they can strike at the *mumble*.

This is based upon a popular series of Australian YA novels. There are six sequels set during the war and another three about the aftermath. I've only read the first one, but it's quite good. The similarity to Red Dawn is obvious. The key differences are (1) there are more girls in this resistance group, which means more romantic subplots (though they remain subplots, so this isn't the Twilight version of Red Dawn), (2) the book only goes up to their first major attack on the enemy, corresponding to maybe the first twenty minutes of Red Dawn, (3) the enemy are never described in much detail, which actually makes the story more jingoistic than Red Dawn, which at least made the Cuban general sympathetic. And don't let the YA label frighten you -- the body count among both good guys and bad guys is pretty good.

Groucho

Some attractive girls in the cast, but really -- who would attach Australia?

Dr Mabuse

Attach it to what?

That would be a hell of thing to see wouldn't it? A whole continent being attached to something?

See I had the idea that there was some sort of attack going on, that there would be a guerrilla-style armed resistance to similar to 'Red Dawn'.

Sean O'Hara

The book never specifies, but they're powerful enough to scare the United States from getting involved.

Just think of it like a Justice League story where Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman are all out of town so the second-tier heroes have a chance to kick some ass.

jfoobar

I saw this trailer a few weeks back in a theater. Hate to say it but it looks pretty awful. The writer/director (first time director) has some pretty ho-hum writing credits as well.

The Antipodean

Yeah I saw a trailer for this and it seems like an unintentional comedy.

MBoyd

I thought the trailer looked crappy as well. Io9 was talking it up this past week. I can see how a YA novel like this would be appealing to . . . well YAs!

Superman07

I thought it looked fun.

rampo

I caught this on a cable channel while in Thailand a couple of months ago. It definitely had a Red Dawn vibe but I actually liked Tomorrow better. It was the highest grossing Australian film for 2010, and the next movie in the series is scheduled to start filming this September.

Cellar Door

I just watched this on Netflix streaming. Very much like Red Dawn, as expected. Not terrible, but not great. The action scenes usually involve one of the kids doing something stupid to almost screw up their plans, then getting things right at the last minute. The enemy forces are really incompetent, and pretty generic. There is no individual villain.

The stunts and effects were pretty good. I didn't get bored. But I'd say the main reason to watch it is the lead actress--she's gorgeous!