Which is why the classic (classically silly) 1984 cult film “Red Dawn” about the invasion of the United States by Cuban and Soviet forces has been remade with new updated villains. Originally, the bad guys were supposed to be the Chinese (you know, the folks who depend on selling stuff to us and hold trillions of dollars of treasury bills). But that was objectionable to the Chinese (and besides, might eliminate distribution of the film in the lucrative Chinese movie market (say what you will about Hollywood, but they do know Capitalism 101) so now the bad guys are – North Koreans? Invading Spokane, Washington? Why yes, yes they are:
A group of teenagers look to save their town from an invasion of North Korean soldiers.
No, not Muslims, Arabs, Iranians, a rogue Pakistani military – but North Koreans. How a country with a Navy primarily composed of small attack boats for coastal defense and an Air Force of aging, outdated and crumbling warplanes incapable of mounting an attack on the United States is able to mount an invasion against the nation with the largest and most sophisticated naval force in the history of the world I leave to the screenwriter’s imagination, because frankly I’m not capable of coming up with even a theoretical scenario where this could occur. But then, who needs facts or plausibility when your target demographic is a bunch of right wing paranoids? For example:
The film adopts a fringe conspiracy theory that has long been pushed by a small, right-wing coalition led by Newt Gingrich: that terrorists or a rogue state could devastate America with an electro-magnetic pulse, or EMP. The idea is that detonating a nuclear weapon way up in the stratosphere would send out an EMP that would fry all of our electronics, from helicopters to coffee makers, easing the way for a foreign invasion. In fact, EMP is untested at best and ineffective at worst; studies suggest it might actually stop as little as five percent of electronics. Even if it did work, America is really big and knocking out our entire lower 48 would require many, many more warheads than North Korea could possibly possess.
The movie also posits that North Korea, with an economy the size of North Dakota, with a starving population, has the wherewithal to carry out multiple nuclear missile launches and a fleet of modern long range transport planes to land thousands of troops and sophisticated weaponry on our West Coast all while taking out America’s command and control centers, thus forcing rebel teens to go all commando on their asses in order to protect our “freedums.” Oh well, as P.T. Barnum once said, there’s a sucker born every minute.
