Tomorrow, When the War Began

Just found this out from Maria Tran's blog, filming for the movie version of  "Tomorrow, When the World Began" by author John Marsden has begun and is set to be released next year.

The book is described as a "young adult invasion novel" - umm what?  Anyway, the book details an invasion by a foreign power.  A small band of teenagers in a small country town group together and launch a campaign of guerilla warfare.  There are seven novels in total so assuming the first movie goes well, the rest of the series will also be made into movies.

One of the main characters is an introverted Asian Australian, Lee Takkam, who is played by Chris Pang.

Lee is part Thai and part Vietnamese and keeps to himself a lot. Before the war, lee played the Violin, Piano and was good at Visual arts at school. Lee, like Ellie, becomes more violent as the war progresses and because he keeps to himself, he sometimes causes a few problems. Lee tends to kill soldiers directly (with knives and guns for example) and becomes more left out when he finds everyone's parents are okay except for his. But Lee, also like Ellie, finds his lighter side with the "feral" children.

Lee's parents own the local Asian restaurant. Yay.

Some things to note and look out for:
There's supposed to be a bit of AM/WF romance, between Lee and Ellie (played by Caitlin Stasey - quite fit).  Knowing how Australian TV and cinema depicts Asian males, it will be interesting to see how far their relationship is explored.

Lee Takkam is supposedly part Thai and part Vietnamese.  But this is really boggling my mind, a quick google of Takkam as a surname results in no matches.  Takkam does not sound Vietnamese so that leaves Thai, but that gives no results either.  I do get Tak Kam, which is cantonese.  I'm also guessing the restaurant will actually be Chinese.  What the hell was John Marsden thinking when he made up the character?  It's all the same?

The foreign invading force in the book is not named and is unidentifiable.  This was verified by an article in The Australian.  I wonder how the film will portray this.
Edit:  Just checked the forum. The invading force will be Asian!  No surprises. 

Masa Yamaguchi - Sergeant

 Andy Minh Trieu - Tanker Soldier

This movie is actually reminding me more and more of the Red Dawn remake that is being released at the end of next year.  The original had a Russian invasion but the remake will have a Chinese invasion.

Talk about Asian Invasion overload in 2010!