The Remake Nobody Asked For

This November, a modern day remake of the Cold War era classic Red Dawn will be hitting theaters.

For those of you too young to know what I'm talking about, the original Red Dawn was a 1984 war movie in which the United States is invaded by the Soviet Union. The Soviet army takes over much of the country, but a group of teenage resistance fighters calling themselves the Wolverines fight back and go to war against the invaders. It's not a bad movie, and it certainly hit a nerve with people who believed that such an invasion could happen. I was only four when the movie came out, so I didn't see it until it was broadcast on TV a few years later. Even at a young age, I heard the movie's message loud and clear. It was totally believable at the time, almost to the point where I had to remind myself that what I was watching was fictional. It's as blatant as propaganda gets, but I have to admire any movie that can grab its audience and make them believe what they're seeing.

As for the remake, well...take a look at the trailer yourself:

The trailer looks like what I would expect from a Red Dawn remake. Most of the elements that I remember from the original seem to be present. There's an invasion from a foreign country, teenage rebels calling themselves Wolverines and lots of stuff blowing up. Sadly, there are no Russians this time. The threat of the Soviet Union is twenty years gone, so the Wolverines will need new commies to kill. Originally, that role was going to be played by the Chinese, but somebody thought it was unwise to make a movie depicting the country that is poised to become the next major world superpower as the enemy, so they did the next best thing.

Instead of an invading Chinese army, we get an invading North Korean army. After all, nobody likes North Korea, right?

*Sigh*

Where do I begin?

First of all, a Red Dawn remake set in the present day seems pretty pointless. Like I said before, the original Red Dawn worked because it took place during the Cold War when a Soviet invasion seemed plausible. It played on people's fears and added a healthy dose of "Die, commie! Die!" jingoism in the process. While a war against North Korea could conceivably happen, chances are that they don't have the resources to actually invade us like they do in this movie. A war against North Korea would most likely be fought on Korean soil, making a movie about a powerful North Korean invasion force taking over a large part of our country laughably unrealistic.

Second of all, the decision to turn the invading Chinese army into an invading North Korean army came so late in the film's production that editors had to digitally alter much of the footage. Chinese flags and uniforms had to be changed to North Korean flags and uniforms, and any dialogue that was originally in Chinese had to be re-dubbed into Korean. No effort was made to make the Asian actors playing the invading Chinese army look Korean. They're Asian, and that's all that apparently matters to us dumbass Americans who believe that all Asians look alike.

Finally, the thing about all of this that bothers me the most is that people are going to get the wrong idea about this movie. North Korea was chosen as the enemy because any remake of Red Dawn needs evil Communists, and the real North Korea is the Communist nation most likely to be hostile towards us. And yet, what I'm seeing is a movie where good, heroic, mostly white Americans fight off an army of evil Asians. Maybe I'm wrong and the movie will be much more racially sensitive than I expect, but any movie with a trailer that has a white man point at an Asian man while telling his kids to "kill this piece of shit" probably isn't striving for political correctness. Something tells me that this movie could very well have been called Yellow Peril without missing a beat.

When I was a child in the 1980s, I believed that Russians were inherently evil. I learned that from movies and TV shows that said as much, and that includes the original Red Dawn. I seriously doubt people will develop that kind of hatred and fear for North Korea or those of Asian descent after seeing the Red Dawn remake, but I can't help thinking that it will at least encourage the most xenophobic and racist people in our country.

This whole thing is especially troubling to me because I have members in my family that are of Korean descent. My wife is Korean, and her two sons are half-Korean. My youngest stepson already has idiots at school telling him things like "We kicked your ass in the Korean War." What's going to happen when these kids or others like them see stuff like the new Red Dawn and start to think that they should watch out for those shifty Koreans? I know I'm probably just being paranoid, but the fact that a movie that could so easily be interpreted in this way could be released in 2012 is a little disturbing.

The new Red Dawn has got to be the stupidest idea to come out of Hollywood in some time. Not only is it the latest in a long line of pointless remakes, but the whole thing comes off as insensitive or even offensive to me. I'm not calling for a boycott of this movie or anything like that, but it's safe to say that I'm going to pass on it.