Taking aim: Josh Pech
The original Red Dawn, vintage 1984, was written and directed by John Milius, an interesting Hollywood character: scriptwriter of Apocalypse Now, auteur of Conan the Barbarian, he’s an arch-conservative and office-bearer of the National Rifle Association, a militarist who sadly missed Vietnam; his solution to the United States’s drug problem is the wholesale massacre of drug dealers and the razing of Mexico.
The new Red Dawn, vintage 2010 but held back from release while it was reworked, does not appear to have been written or directed by anyone. Certainly no thinking person could have put together this tosh, or so one imagines; I suppose one should never underestimate the sheer blind stupidity of which most of us humans are capable.
The Milius Red Dawn posited a Soviet invasion of the US, just in time for Ronald Reagan’s second term and the continuation of his religiously anti-communist policies. Such policies also fostered public paranoia against what Reagan dubbed “the Evil Empire”, and Milius’s movie was a fantasy about plucky little underdog Americans forming a heroic resistance to the inhumanly militarised and almost all-powerful Soviets.
Same thing here, in the remade Red Dawn, except the Evil Empire is North Korea. Well, back in 2009 or 2010 when the movie was shot, the Evil Empire was (slightly) more plausibly China. But that had to be changed to avoid offending the second-largest economy on Earth, so various redubs and reshoots and so on were ordered, and two years later we have this nonsense. In fairness, its release was also delayed by the financial collapse of movie studio MGM, though if MGM was going to greenlight such obviously bad ideas then its implosion was probably to be foreseen.
In the meantime, of course, we’ve had the Australian version of Red Dawn, which was called Tomorrow, When the War Began. It was about a bunch of Australian teenagers fighting a guerrilla war against whichever horde of inscrutable and cruel orientals had invaded their continent. That’s how inscrutable the invaders were — we don’t even know where they were from! Anyway, Tomorrow, When the War Began was based on a long series of novels for teens, so prepare for a sequel, possibly to be called The Day After Tomorrow, When the War Carried on Some More. And, after that, part three: The Day After the Day After Tomorrow, When the War Dragged on for Another Few Years. In this case, a quick victory for the good guys is not wanted, or we’d have no sequels.
Jingoist fantasy
Why didn’t the makers of Red Dawn Redux simply turn the invaders into Martians, say? Aliens of any kind, really — giant spidery creatures, that sort of thing, or great gobby globby blob aliens, perhaps, the kind that simply schlurp you to death? You face no diplomatic-financial troubles if your Evil Empire is not in fact human at all or, better yet, if it’s from outer space.
But then why did the makers of Red Dawn Reflux want to remake Milius’s jingoist fantasy at all? Were they suffering an especially acute attack of sinophobia that year? Perhaps the Dalai Lama’s objections to the Chinese rule over his homeland finally filtered through into their minds, and someone felt it was high time the Free World struck back at those inscrutable, cruel orientals, the oppressors of those other orientals, the ones who are just as inscrutable but aren’t so cruel because they are associated with that nice man who wears sandals with socks, knows Deepak Chopra personally and may even have something to do with the monk who sold his Ferrari.
One thing to be thankful for in this Red Dawn is that Chris Hemsworth, starring as a marine who has served in Iraq, is here sporting a short-haired and unshaven look that is much more fetchingly butch than his golden Thor locks, which, let’s be frank, are a tad girly. Also, rather than speaking the flowery faux-biblicalese of the Norse god of thunder, here he is able to speak in gruff ejaculations, John Wayne style, giving manly orders that are not so much spoken as coughed.
Just as well, really, that Hemsworth’s character is a trained soldier, and was home from Iraq at just this moment, because after the hordes of North Koreans drop from the sky and start machine-gunning peace-loving Americans someone has to take this bunch of high-school kids in hand and teach them how to machine-gun North Koreans.
And it’s all very neatly done, at least in terms of timing. Even if what’s actually going on in the movie won’t add up, it is divided into a precise three-act structure, as scriptwriting gurus advise. At exactly half an hour into Red Dawn, the first act and set-up done, we get the traditional montage sequence in which the teens learn to become deadly warriors in about the time it takes to hear half a pop song. Actually, they learn a great deal more than that, for we are informed via voice-over that they are now a superbly organised urban-guerrilla force, a real thorn in the side of the North Korean occupiers. This is not shown to us in the relevant montage, unfortunately — probably for security reasons. Siyabonga Cwele would doubtless approve.
It’s unclear where these youthful warriors live, once their cabin in the woods has been torched, or how much practice is needed to become such expert marksmen … sorry, let’s not be sexist, markspeople. The girls get to do some bazookering, note, especially the girl who we hopelessly out-of-date masculinist militarists might have thought least likely to shoulder an RPG: that’s the blonde Barbie Doll cheerleader, the one who looks like she had plastic surgery in the womb.