SPOILER ALERT: This column contains details related to the
2012 remake of Red Dawn. If you plan on
seeing the movie and don’t want know too much about the storyline before
watching it, stop reading now.
The world that existed in 1984 when the original Red Dawn
movie appeared in movie theaters and that of the remake are two very different
times.
The year before the original’s release the Soviet Union shot
down Korean Airline Lines Flight 007 after the commercial jetliner flew through
Russian airspace and the United States military invaded the Marxist-ruled
Caribbean nation of Grenada.
And in between burying Communist Party general-secretaries
and rumbling mechanized units through Red Square on May Day, Moscow was locked in
a bloody quagmire in Afghanistan. The
USSR, through the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and Communist FMLN in El Salvador,
managed to establish a tenuous beachhead in North America.
Things were tense between the two superpowers in 1984, a
tension that would eventually strain the Soviets beyond their capacity to
compete and led to the collapse of Communist regimes across eastern
Europe.
In 1984, there was a better chance of World War III than the
Soviet bloc’s largely peaceful dissolution that played out six years
later. The movie Red Dawn had an
audience because Americans thought direct conflict between the US and the
Soviet Union was likely.
The villains of yesterday are no more pleasant but seem less
threatening. Russian soldiers no longer
patrol a divided Germany but their country’s western frontier with
Ukraine. And their ally Cuba, which
played a role in bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war in the 1960s,
is grudgingly adapting to capitalism.
The Red Menace has been displaced by Islamist terrorists,
but the real thing makes for a political unpalatable nemesis for the
entertainment industry. And it turned
out that Plan B wouldn’t work either, but for financial reasons.
The Red Dawn remake was supposed to be released two years
ago, though it underwent a seven-figure editing job to remove all spoken and
visual references to the People’s Republic of China, which was slated as the
movie’s original (and more plausible) aggressor, and inserted North Korea as
the invader.
Now the thought of North Korea landing soldiers in the
United States sounded ridiculous.
The hilariously named Democratic People’s Republic of Korea
can barely feed its people and its “green water navy” is best equipped for
challenging coastal civilian fishing vessels than moving a large occupation
force over 6000 miles (roughly the distance between Pyongyang and Los Angeles).
And even if North Korea could magically move undetected
across the Pacific Ocean the world’s fourth largest army, their 1,000,000
person active force would be spread pretty thin along America’s 2100 mile long
western coastline.
With China “not appearing in this picture”, a North Korean
invasion of the US not resembling King Arthur’s assault on the French castle
from Monty Python’s Holy Grail requires a super-sized suspension of
disbelief.
So where did the 600 million screaming Chinese (a reference
to the original film) and their 730 million cousins that didn’t get nuked in
1984 go?
It turned out that Beijing takes not only a keen interest in
what their citizens tweet and blog but also what comes out of Hollywood.
The Global Times, a publication owned by the Chinese
Communist Party, took public issue with its national military playing the
villain and Red Dawn’s producers took the hint: sanitize the movie or its only
entry into that country’s lucrative movie market will be through bootleg
dvds.
It might come to that anyway as the Global Times has even
mocked the changes and called the Red Dawn movie style “brainless fun”. I’d be willing to lay 60 yuan ($4) that a
movie about popular insurrection against Communist military forces will never
be projected upon the silver screen of a licensed mainland cinema, if only as a
favor to their “Dear Friend” Kim Jong Un, AKA The Onion’s sexiest man alive.
So how do parts of the United States come under the jackboot
of North Korea?
After a night of high school football in Spokane,
Washington, the power across the entire town mysteriously goes out. The next day the skies are clouded with
North Korean paratroopers raining down on the eastern Washington State
population center.
It is later reveled that an EMP-like “super weapon” (the
same thing that prefaced occupation in the television miniseries Amerika)
knocked out communications and power across the country allowing the North
Koreans to tiptoe across the world’s largest ocean.
Spokane is targeted because the west coast and eastern
seaboard have been devastated by a surprise quasi-nuclear attack.
America’s capacity to launch a nuclear counter-offensive has
been neutralized by the “super weapon” as our boomers (ballistic missile subs)
were knocked out by the EMP.
It is also revealed that Russia, which is led by a radical
nationalist, is behind the assault on America, leading the invasion of the east
coast and having counter-insurgent personnel in Spokane. There is also a weak-reference to Mexico and
Cuba being involved, though that was also likely watered down to avoid
upsetting Hispanics/swing-voters.
Americans being a resilient and well-armed people (a little
reminder that the Second Amendment has nothing to do with hunting), unorganized
citizen militias and detached military units operating independently stymie the
invaders’ onslaught around Alabama in the southeast, Michigan in the northeast,
Texas in the southwest and Colorado and Montana in the northwest.
The movie largely is a recreation of the original, including
an homage to the 1984 film’s signature ambush scene, but in a different setting
and with a change in the Communist occupiers’ ethnicity. The 2012 version of the Wolverines are more
diverse than the 1984 band of rebels.
A few other things worth noting:
1)
Though they are very much villains, the North Koreans are
portrayed more benign than the Russians from 1984. Knowing how they treat their countrymen, I have a tough time
believing the DPRK invaders would allow Americans to largely live as they did
before, including operating businesses and driving cars. I’m still stuck on the thought of them
allowing civilian fuel consumption in the middle of a war. Of all of the suspensions of disbelief, this
was the toughest for me to overcome.
2)
The most interesting aspect of the movie is how American
society is shown reacting to the occupation.
With few exceptions, most people seem to go along with the regime while
more than a few actively collaborate with the invading forces, including the
town’s mayor and the media, accepting subservience to the new state in exchange
for necessities and privileges. That
got me wondering how many of our countrymen would readily exchange freedom for
security, whether from immediate persecution or hardship.
3)
The objective of the Wolverines was not merely killing the
enemy and damaging their military hardware but inspiring their subjugated
brethren to resist. This is the reverse
objective of terrorism, which aims to demoralize.
4)
I can understand why the movie wasn’t released until after the
election. The film’s opening is a
montage of actual press clips featuring President Barack Obama, Vice-President
Joseph Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton fumbling America’s foreign
policy as the global situation spirals down.
Also featured throughout the film are the North Korean occupying forces’
ubiquitous propaganda posters that decry corporate greed, stuff straight out of
Occupy Wall Street and President Obama’s re-election campaign.
