Just in case you're not up on your late Cold War cinema, the
original Red Dawn was the story of a bunch of high school pals in rural
Colorado turned guerrilla fighters after the Soviet Union, with an assist from
Cuba, decided for some reason to invade the United States in 1985. The 2012 remake pretty much sticks to the
original script, swapping rural Washington state for Colorado and China for the
now-defunct Soviet Union in the role of the antagonist.
Or maybe it is North Korea? As I wrote when the Red Dawn
remake first went into production, the film's creative team pulled back from
the logical substitution of China for the Soviet Union – possibly fearing a
political backlash, a loss of Chinese distribution rights, or both – and
instead substituted North Korea as the resident bad guys. Though the producers
seem to have later decided that the idea North Korea, a nation of 25 million
that struggles just to feed its own citizens, could stage a large-scale
invasion of the United States stretches credibility too far even for a
Hollywood action film (though Hollywood also recently decided that a movie version of Manimal is somehow credible), so now, according to The
Guardian, the antagonists are from a “unidentified Asian” country.
Near the end of The Guardian's demolishing of the Red
Dawn trailer, writer Stuart Heritage raises a good point: the original Red
Dawn was released in the mid-1980s, at a time when the United States was
offering moral and material support to the mujahadeen of Afghanistan as they
tried to repel the mighty Red Army of the Soviet Union. The original Red Dawn offered up a
kinship to be drawn then between our plucky band of Colorado high schoolers and
the scruffy Afghanis, who each took to the hills to fight the foreigners who
invaded their lands.
Fast forward 27 years though and America's perception of
Afghan insurgents has morphed from the heroic mujahadeen into the dastardly
Taliban jihadi; the foreigners they fight are no longer the evil Soviets, but
rather good red-blooded American boys and girls in uniform. So while the new Red Dawn is still
making the same visceral appeal to the audience to identify with the tragically
over-matched band of fighters who want only to free their homeland from an
invading foreign military force, the underlying role of the United States in
the world has flipped – rather than supporting the insurgents on the sly as we
did in the 1980s, we have become the invading heavies in both Iraq and
Afghanistan. In reality, Red Dawn
is now asking us to emotionally identify with the very people fighting against
American troops today. (If the producers of Red Dawn wanted to keep the
emotional and subtextual consistency of the original, then instead of fighting,
the high school kids in RD:Redux would join a local reconstruction team
headed up by a government official from the unnamed Asian nation that might be
North Korea).
It does beg the question of what exactly the producers of
the Red Dawn remake were thinking in dredging up this largely forgotten
bit of 80s pop culture? Why ask an American audience to identify with a band of
local insurgents fighting against a vastly superior military power, when at
that very same moment American troops are being attacked a half a world away by
bands of local insurgents fighting against a vastly superior military power,
which, in this case, just happens to be the United States.
Or maybe I am giving the Red Dawn producers too much
credit for being able to make these intellectual connections in the first
place. After all, their choice to play the All-American lead in this film was
Chris Hemsworth, a British actor best known for playing a Norse god.
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