Come for the Bombast, Get Stuck with the Stupidity

The original Red Dawn came along at a specific time, an era where the kind of Cold War fears could still play to general audiences. “What if the Soviets invaded the United States,” seemed scarier then, even if (when you really thought about it) the whole premise was completely stupid. But hey, that was the kind of media audiences in the 1980s really wanted. Pro-America, rally round the flag, let’s fight the Soviets here and there and everywhere (even in a boxing ring). And it worked, with most people that watched the film enjoying it, letting Red Dawn become a small success at the Box Office.

Of course, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the USSR breaking up into its constituent countries, put an end to that kind of Cold War fear. And while the countries have changed, and the balance of power in the world has certainly shifted, we’ve never gotten back to a place where we have had to worry about some country invading us and trying to make us a vassal to them. Russia isn't in a position to do it (they can barely handle invading Ukraine) and China isn’t that kind of country (they want to consolidate power, not go hard on imperialism). We’re not in a place where another Red Dawn would really play out.

And yet, in 2012, FilmDistrict decided that it was the perfect time to try and reboot the film. Sure, we didn’t have the Russians as our big villains anymore, but that’s easy to fix, right? Just swap out one communist country for another, and instead of Russia we have China… no, wait. Not China. Making China the bad guys would limit the possibility of the film getting released in China (which, spoiler, didn’t happen anyway). So let’s make the villain another communist country (because we have to have the “Red” in Red Dawn). Instead maybe… North Korea?

Yeah, you can already see the issue here. This film is a neutered, sad attempt to find that same “rah rah, America!” rally ‘round the Box Office thrill as the original film, but in an era when there was no good villain to actually use as the invading force. The film wasn’t able to sell it well, and when the movie came out audiences weren’t buying it, either. On a budget of $65 Mil 2012’s Red Dawn only managed to make $51 Mil (making its ending that clearly sets up a sequel seem pretty silly now). The film flopped, and no one bothers remembering it at all… unless we’re discussing the original film and how, for some reason, a studio thought they could make a second one.

The basic setup of Red Dawn is the same. Two brothers – Chris Hemsworth as older brother, and enlisted Marine, Jed Eckert, and Josh Peck as younger brother Matt Eckert – wake up after a high school football game to find that there are soldiers invading their sleepy town of Spokane, Washington. Hoping in a truck to find their father, instead they find thousands of North Korean soldiers everywhere. They drive off, collecting other teens as they go, until they all end up at the Eckert cabin up in the mountains where they plan to hide out until everything blows over.

But everything won’t just blow over as this was a full-scale invasion of the United States by the North Koreans. Realizing that their only options are to fight or give up, Jed decides to fight and he convinces most of crew with him – Josh Hutcherson as Robert Kitner, Adrianne Palicki as Toni Walsh, Isabel Lucas as Erica Martin, Connor Cruise as Daryl Jenkins, Alyssa Diaz as Julie Goodyear – to join the fight with him. They find the gear, they hide out deep in the mountains, and they plan strikes, working to destabilize the North Korean military in the area, all under the name of the local football team: the Wolverines!

It’s not a one-to-one remake of the original film as plenty of character details and scenes are changed, but functionally it’s telling the same story. Teens fight against a well-trained army and, somehow, are able to cause real damage and even weaken the regime from the inside. It was silly enough when depicted in the 1984 original, but at least in that film the forces put against our heroes felt threadbare, like the Soviets overreached and were struggling to keep control. Here, we have a group of teens battling thousands of entrenched soldiers working in a well organized military system, and it seems laughable that they could manage to do any damage at all.

Not that the film helps itself out. For starters, it keeps making big twists that only suck viewers out of the movie. The Wolverines will be doing well, and then somehow their base will be found (without explanation) or somehow the bad guys will be onto them (and still somehow let them slip away). Instead of a cat-and-mouse game between invaders and insurgents, the film feels like it’s going for big, shocking moments that don’t actually make logical sense in the context of the larger film. It can’t just be a document of how insurgents fight a stronger force (which, you know, was what the first film was all about). It has to be big and bombastic and loud… and mostly it just ends up being dumber because of it.

I think I would have been fine with the story being a bit stupid (the fact that North Korea is able to invade so easily is a giant leap you just have to accept to get into the film) if the film tried to invest at all in its characters. The characters in this Red Dawn remake, though, are paper thin, even in comparison to the previous movie. That film gave each character a single trait to define them, but that’s still one more trait than Red Dawn ‘12 manages. Outside of Jed, the Marine, we have a handful of generic characters who all talk and act the same. Some are boys, some are girls, but they all fill the same exact slots on the team, and you don’t care about any of them.

It’s actually pretty funny because the film thinks you’re going to care about these people, such that when one of them dies every other character acts shocked and hurt. And yet, when these people died, all I could think was, “wait, which one was that? What was their name?” I didn’t have any investment in them, not as people, because the film never made me care. And since I also wasn’t invested in the plot at all, because it’s so unbelievably dumb, then everything fell apart. Red Dawn couldn’t convince me to care, not once, so I sat there bored the whole time.

I don’t know if keeping the villains as the Chinese would have helped the film at all. Certainly China is a superpower that could try and invade the U.S. They would have a better shot at it than the North Koreans. Hell, I don’t even know how the North Koreans would get out of their own bay before the South Koreans stopped them, let alone actually make it all the way over to the Western Seaboard of the United States. China could do it, and that at least would make you think, but the film is so gutless it can’t even commit to the villain that could (although, again, wouldn’t) actually invade. So it half-asses it and fails before the film even starts.

Still, the biggest issue with the movie (among all of its various flaws) is just that there is no reason for this movie to exist. We’re not in the same world we once were, and this story of the U.S. getting invaded didn’t strike anyone as compelling. The world has moved on from this kind of war, and there aren’t any Cold War fears to play on to get audiences invested. Red Dawn ‘12 came out at the wrong time, in the wrong place, for the wrong audience. Pretty much any time after 1984 was too late for a movie like this, and it shows.