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 How a country with a Navy primarily composed of small attack boats for coastal defense and an Air Force of aging, outdated and crumbling warplanes incapable of mounting an attack on the United States is able to mount an invasion against the nation with the largest and most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.
Wowie, zowie. The United States must be running out of nation states willing to play the “enemy” role.
But we can;t cut the defense budget! Look over there = the Axis of Evil!
Is liberals. Soft on defense, crime and race mixing.
I wonder why they didn’t nut up and make it about an internal insurrection against a usurper. It’s what the fans of this crap really want.
Those of us old enough to remember when Rambo came out may remember it as no less stupid than this flick. Ignorant angry white men, still angry about our demise in Vietnam, were suckers for Stallone’s single-handed do-over. It was depressing, as a teen, to realize how uninformed people could be.
I don’t think this flick will touch into a similar chord. The “usurper” theme would have had a better shot. Even so, we’ve come a long way since 1980. There are a higher percentage of people who have some sense of reality.
ARE IN MY PAAAAAAANTS!!!!
Man, I can’t wait …
… Until I can laugh at the stacks of this in the DVD discount bin. Which should be about 4 months after the theatrical release.
Well, when a militarist imperial power doesn’t have enemies, it has to create them. But this is ridiculous.
Reserve your copy now, “conservatives”! I think we can safely say you are the target market, haha.
And oh how the “mighty” have fallen. Can’t the Hitlerian Iranian Ayatollahs and their madman ally Bin Ladin (who isn’t really dead, of course, he’s currently on a WWII Nazi sub with the cloned son of Adolf himself) get in on this invasion action at all?! NO Islamofascists, NONE? In 2012?! I don’t see how a wingnut could take this flick seriously without ’em! Not reality based!
MGM’s fiscal problems shelved it. It was supposed to be a 2010, summer of the Tea Party release.
And it postponed any more James Bond films for a while. Kinda funny that both are now coming out within 2 weeks of each other.
They’d be better off making aliens the bad guys. It’s much easier to believe.
I guess we’re supposed to pretend that they’re Chinese.
Actually the Teabagistani’s will probably claim the Chinese outsourced the invasion to the North Koreans,
You know any idiotic idea is saleable in Teabagistan.
Look at the last two campaign cycles for concrete evidence.
Here’s the thing: The original “Red Dawn” was a fever dream that combined the fear of communists with the fantasy of gun-loving red-blooded American youths being able to defend themselves. It was a ridiculous premise then and now.
BUT young-actors-before-they-were-full-stars like Patrick Swayze, C. Thomas Howell, Charlie Sheen and Jennifer Grey packed the action with emotional wallop. The reason this film became a cult classic has nothing to do with taking any kind of political position. It is the basic human myth of the Few striving against adversity on the “Hero’s Journey” from adolescence to adulthood. It’s about tribal bonding against the elements. Substitute zombies for North Koreans and you can tell the same story. At its root core, it is about humans struggling to survive in a hostile environment. We tell ourselves certain stories to teach us to respond in ways that insure our survival. That is why myths are compelling.
I utterly doubt that this remake can improve upon the original but if it illustrates the MYTH instead of focusing on the contrived PREMISE a new generation of teenagers will shout, “Wolverines!” And it won’t have a damned thing to do with how they vote.
For added irony, I remember the Cuban commander in the original Red Dawn making quite a few insightful observations about the futility of their occupation, how they were making more enemies than they were eliminating, the nature of war, etc. It wasn’t a completely brain-dead film. Recent events leads one to believe the viewing public didn’t get anything more than entertainment from it though.
I loved the part where the Cuban commander turned a blind eye because Swayze and the others were true revolutionaries which he lamented his side no longer were.
But yeah, it would have made more sense in the 1950’s with Soviets. In fact, a motion picture with the acting quality and production values of Red Dawn would probably have been an Oscar contender in 1956.
“an EMP that would fry all of our electronics, from helicopters to coffee makers”
No, please, not the coffee maker! Noooooooooooo!
They are using N Koreans because there are no other markets Hollywood doesn’t sell movies to.
OK maybe they miss some places like Somalia which if they made a movie about Muslim Somalian warriors invaded America that would surely be a box office hit.
About the original Red Dawn… There were two other appeals at the time. A good chunk of Americans thought Americans and the youth were soft and taking too much for granted. Disco, cocaine, wall street greed, the 70s, etc. combined with too few actually serving their country for many years and many years since America actually won a war was a good mixture to get people thinking about what if we were actually attacked and had to sacrifice.
It was a stupid movie then and a stupid movie now. But, as you point out, look at the target market. The two things I took away from the original was of the failure of the revolution when it becomes imperial, and that when the offal makes contact with the oscillating unit, when you and everyone one around you is hungry as hell, at least in this “country” you can’t trust anyone, not even your own brother.