Tomorrow When the War Began

So, as I am on a night shift schedule, I get pretty darned bored. And so I have been trawling Netflix during my copious amounts of free time. And at a certain point, one runs out of good movies to watch without simply dipping into the 70's and 60's and beyond. Not that there aren't good movies there...but if you want modern movies, you have to go foreign at that point.

When I first saw the description of the movie Tomorrow The War Began, I thought "oh great...a crappy remake of Red Dawn...except in Australia, with modern dummy kids. Add in a pinch of stupid high school drama and idiot love triangles, and voila! A silly movie that makes no sense.

And I wasn't really disappointed. The acting was fine...to my surprise, but the plot was exactly what I had surmised from the description. Some kids go into the Australian "bush" to escape society their parents and have sex and shoot rabbits. Or something. That part was never quite made clear.

I wouldn't be posting about it except for two things that stuck out to me. The first was that the film was co-produced or given the thumbs up or something by the Australian something or other agency...the government. The second thing that stuck out to me was the failure of the government to respond to the situation in the film...making a great case for an armed citizenry.

You may not know this, but other than hunting rifles (licensed of course), Australians cannot have weapons of any kind. Not even swords. They took gun control...rather weapon control...to a whole new level in Australia some years back. I remember some Aussie friends of mine complaining about it. Unless you have a very hard-to-get hunters license...and hunting is only for government controlled culling there...you cannot have a weapon. Not even an 18th century musket. Nonetheless, they show the kids in the film having a hunting rifle or two to kill rabbits with. Rabbits in Australia is a whole thing, so I'll buy that for kids going into the bush.

However, in the movie, an unidentified Asian country that happens to speak Mandarin invades (they are never identified, but, lets just say, they aren't the Japanese or North Koreans). And the kids have, like, one hunting rifle...which they don't even use. They have to blow up a lawn mower to kill some commie-chinese unidentified Asian soldiers to get a hold of a single AK-whatever weapon the soldiers were using, and use that as their only means of self-defense.

These kids were somehow gifted enough (lucky enough) to use garbage trucks and petrol gasoline trucks to do their guerrilla deeds. But it got them killed or shot a lot, and their efforts were kind of meaningless if you consider the magnitude of the situation...compared to the Wolverines of Red Dawn.

And the fact that the Australian government sponsored this movie is what adds to the irony that...these people are unarmed, and facing an invasion scenario, the government itself was completely impotent, and the people themselves equally so...because they were unarmed. Not even a fake replica sword amongst them.

We on the right side of the Constitution argue often that the 2nd amendment is about protecting ourselves from an oppressive government. We aren't necessarily talking about our own government. Sometimes defenses fail, even with the best planning and what not (which our government has clearly shown they are incapable of anyway). If we were invaded, I would bet my banjo that those who tried and failed over the years to ban guns of all types would be thanking God that they had failed.

Because America would be one tough nut to crack.