In the Summer of 1942 the Imperial Japanese war machine had handed stunning defeats to the naval and land forces of both Britain and the United States. They had conquered an area greater than any other in the history of modern warfare and the addition of Australia to the Japanese Empire seemed inevitable and imminent.

The Japanese had invested the town of Gona on the northern coast of New Guinea and planned to cross the Owen Stanley Range to take the city of Port Moresby on the southern coast. Port Moresby would have provided an excellent launching site for the invasion of Australia. In May of 1942 an Allied intercept of Japanese radio messages revealed the Japanese plans. But General Douglas Macarthur and his "Bataan bunch" refused to believe that the Japanese would really try to march an army over the perilous Kokoda Trail which was the only pass through the jungle mountains.

Finally Macarthur decided to dispatch some Australian troops – who he considered to be of little value anyway – to block the Kokoda Trail which he believed was a narrow mountain pass. The troops were "chocolate soldiers", new militia recruits who received almost no training and were armed with World War One vintage rifles and little ammunition. When they finally reached the pass after an exhausting climb up steep and dangerous slopes through near impenetrable jungle, the pass proved to be a seven mile wide valley. Soon after they found themselves in deadly combat with a much larger and far better armed invasion force made up of some of Japan's most elite combat forces. For three months they held that force at bay while Macarthur threatened them with court martial for cowardice in failing to quickly defeat what he insisted had to be a tiny Japanese reconnassance party. This was the first defeat of Japanese forces and in many ways proved to be the turning point of the entire war. This motion picture tells a story representative of the bravery of these men.

Against the backdrop of the battle on the Kokoda Trail, a group of 10 soldiers find themselves cut off from the main body of troops. They are lost, some are wounded, and they are closely pursued by the Japanese. The inevitable dilemma arises over whether to leave their wounded mates behind or carry them, thus reducing their chances of eluding capture. This choice is sharpened by the fact that one of the wounded men is the younger brother of one of ablebodied.


The characters of the men are little more than action figures animated by a group of talented but underutilized young actors that includes Jack Finsterer, Tom Budge, Travis McMahon, and Luke Ford. But the screenplay limits the emotional territory for the cast. Perhaps screenwriter John Lonie and director Alister Grierson wanted to keep the focus strictly on the external conflict the Aussies faced with the Japanese and the jungle environment but they left the characters without enough substance for us to really make emotional contact with them. For this reason, while convincing as action, the film is not as moving as it could have been, Nevertheless, it is successful as a homage to the qualities of courage, endurance, and dedication that characterized the troops who saved our nation from invasion that summer in 1942.