TOMORROW WHEN THE WAR BEGAN Directed by Stuart Beattie. Starring Caitlin Stasey, Rachel Hurd-Wood, Lincoln Lewis 12A cert, gen release, 103 min

YOU HAVE TO credit the film- makers for trying. Older adolescents have not been so well served by recent movies – there’s a yawning gap between talking-squirrel movies and the cinema of full-blown evisceration – so a drama following lovely young Australians as they repel a foreign invasion sounds like a nicely enticing project.

Sadly, Tomorrow When the War Begannever quite takes off. Everything about it feels just a semi-tone off-key. The dialogue is the tiniest bit clunky. The characters are too mono-dimensional for comfort. The action sequences don't quite fit together. Stuart Beattie, an experienced Hollywood scriptwriter making his directorial debut, needed to recalibrate just the tiniest bit to make the piece function effectively.

Take the opening sections. It’s hard to resist the sense that, when planning a camping trip, the heroes are working hard to cover every possible demographic. Let’s invite a pious young Christian. Let’s invite somebody Asian. Let’s invite a selfish jock. How they failed to hook up with a disabled person is beyond me.

When our heroes return from the outback, they discover that a foreign invasion has occurred and their parents have been locked up in detention camps. Apparently the only people in Australia who were away for the day, the gang form themselves into an informal resistance group. Before too long, they are wielding rifles and contemplating a forced propulsion into adult responsibility.

Tomorrow When the War Beganplays, as you will have already deduced, like an Antipodean version of John Milius's Red Dawn. The comparison throws up some troubling conclusion as to the film's political stance. Whereas the 1984 film, concerning an invasion of the US by Soviet troops, did, at least, spring from an already existing conflict, Tomorrowposits an attack by vaguely defined Asian maniacs. Beg pardon?

John Marsden’s source novel, something of a cult hit, is, by all accounts, a humane piece of work. The film, however, comes dangerously close to revisiting Edwardian paranoia concerning the “Yellow Peril”. Isn’t modern, liberal Australia now supposed to be pals with its nearest neighbours? Dubious stuff.