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Anyone who has seen my Top 50 Favorite Movies list knows I love the 1984 film Red Dawn. Not only is it on my list, it is my second favorite film of all time; ranking above movies made by greats such as Kurosawa and Kubrick. I love it that much. It is a movie about a group of teenagers who fight off Soviet forces who invade America and they have to fight them off in a guerrilla war that is like The Battle of the Algiers meets the violence of the final scene of The Wild Bunch. As such a fan of the original, when I heard of that a remake was in the making, I was VERY worried.
Remakes can be great movies when put in good hands and done right. In fact Cape Fear by Martin Scorsese with De Niro, Juliette Lewis, and Nick Nolte is one of my favorite movies and in my opinion is better than the original. A good remake needs to be put in the hands of a legitimate and proven film maker, have a good cast of very good actors, should reflect the original movies message and or themes, have a few call backs to the original, and the source material should not be considered a classic. Fail to do this and you end up with the Planet of the Apes remake by Tim Burton, which is a movie I really hate.
With these thoughts in mind, I followed the film’s details closely online. What first caught my attention was that Chris Hemsworth was going to play Jed Eckert. This was really good news for me since I thought he was great in Thor and The Avengers and was the only good thing about the sh!tty snow white movie he was in. However the rest of the news I read was far from good. Chris was the only name on the credits who stood out as being in good films. The rest of the cast were either people I did not know, where in films and TV shows I had not and would not check out, or were in films I had seen but were pretty bad. The most notable of this was Isabel Lucas who was the transformer who could imitate humans in that god awful Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen movie, and Adrianne Palicki who was in the infamous NBC Wonder Woman pilot which tried to make Wonder Woman a ruthless and violent vigilante anti hero. Not even kidding. So much for a great cast. In addition this was director Dan Bradley’s first feature film, which did not help increase my enthusiasm. And while the original Red Dawn is not going to be counted among film classics like The Wizard of Oz or The Godfather, it is a movie that is very much a product of its time. The movie is a film firmly set in the later years of the Cold War, and is set during among the more tense years. See my original Red Dawn review in my Top 50 list for more details. So doing a remake of a movie set in the Cold War, and setting it in modern times is not a good idea. Imagine trying to do a remake of Dr Strangelove set in the modern day without the Russkies. Sounds like a terrible idea right? The original concept of the movie had potential to give us an almost equally imposing enemy for the modern movie. It was to be an invasion by the Chinese coming to collect on defaulted US loans. A very large and imposing military force and the second most notable and brutal Communist country had great potential to be the big bad and powerful enemy this movie needed. However that was cut after the film wrapped. In June of 2010 the movie changes China as the films enemy and replaced it with North Korea. This was done because MGM was in financial difficulty and they wanted to continue to have access to the very lucrative Chinese markets, so the Chinese were replaced with the North Koreans and called for lots of CGI to replace North Korean flags over the Chinese ones, and some additional edits. And to top it off, the involvement of John Milius the original co-writer and directer of the first film seemed nonexistent.
These cons aside there was still hope and it came in the strangest form. When reviews started to come out, they were overwhelmingly negative. That actually gave me hope. The original Red Dawn is not a critical darling, and received mixed reviews at the time of release. So the fact that it was not liked by critics was actually a good sign. One of the negative reviews was by Drew Hunt of the Chicago Reader who could not even get through the first sentence of his review without a Tea Party reference. But my favorite review was by Joe Niccum of the Kansas City Star who said flat out that the only people who would like this movie were secessionists and militia members. Let’s face it, if this movie is getting these kinds of reviews from film critics, then it had a very good chance of capturing the original feel of the first film, and was the best show of promise I had seen since Hemsworth's casting. But even then I was still very worried and I did not get my hopes up.
Right before I went to see the movie I stopped off at my local comic book store to pick up a few issues, I chatted a bit with the guy who works there. The last words I spoke before I left was “Let’s see how bad they can f**k up one of my favorite movies.” I got my ticket and sat in the theater with the mindset that I was going to HATE this movie. So how was the movie? I thought it was actually pretty good. Nowhere near as good as the original, but as far as remakes go I thought it was one of the good ones.
The movie captured my attention in the opening scene, where the filmmaker takes a page from the Dawn of the Dead remake and sets up the film in a series of media clips and news stories that show the film is set in a world where a new ultra-nationalist regime has taken over Russia and has become the new sugar daddy to North Korea in the way of arms and military equipment. It also shows a massive cyber war to feel out weaknesses in US defenses. The movie then cuts to Washington state where we meet the Eckerts at a high school football game where Matt Eckert is the quarterback. We set up the characters, who they are and their relationships. And at about the ten minute mark we see North Korean paratroopers dropping into the suburbs, hence starting the action. The movie captured the same feel and was faithful to the same themes of patriotism, loyalty to friends and family, and comradeship the original had. It also captured the same feel as the first movie with a few call backs to the original. Most notably was when one of the teenagers raised his SAW to the sky and cried “WOLVERINES.” This moment was able to get me to the same emotional high I had during the original scene from the first movie. It was at this point where I thought to myself “they are actually doing a pretty good job.” They did add a few twists to certain call backs like with the deer blood scene. This kept the film feeling fresh and not recycled. In addition Matt Eckert gets a much bigger character arc in this move then in the original. And despite the rather weak casting, they actually do pretty good jobs.
But this movie does have its flaws. Very glaring flaws. Most notable is that an invasion by North Korea is not very feasible. If North Korea is going to invade anywhere, they are going to invade South Korea, if they are going to do anything to the US, it will be nuclear. In the original movie the vehicles for the Russians were painstakingly recreated for the film with a Kubrick level of attention to detail. In this movie the North Koreans are running around in US humvees, which is incredibly lazy. The action is shot in the shacky cam, and that can get a tad distracting, and not as good as the action scenes shot by Milius. In addition there is no character equivalent to Colonel Bella from the first movie, leaving the enemy force without a human face to it. And finally the movie is WAY to Marine Corp for me. As an infantryman in the US Army we have a healthy relationship with Marines in much the same way two brothers do. We will talk massive amounts of ***** to each other and deride one another like it is no tomorrow in order to claim superiority. But we are ultimately on the same team. But that being said the USMC stuff in this movie is so over done that it made me sick. In addition the fact that a Command Sergeant Major was actually leading a team into enemy territory made me laugh! When you reach that rank you are an office guy and an overseer, not a field leader. Also one critical scene was changed from the original where Daryl betrays the Wolverines. In the original he was a traitor, in this movie he is basically low jacked which robs the movie of a lot of tragedy. Another scene left out of the movie was when the Eckert boys visit their father in a reeducation camp. taking out an equally powerful scene from the movie and replaced it with a half assed execution. And finally while I said the acting on the part of the cast was fine, the look they had screamed “pretty teenagers playing soldier.” The cast of the original movie outside of Charlie Sheen, Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey looked like normal teenagers, and did not look like a bunch of models or actors ripped from the Disney channel.
But overall I still say I enjoyed the movie. Given the cards it was dealt, this movie could have been WAY worse then it turned out. It has its flaws yes, but there were positive aspects to the film I enjoyed. Is it the worst movie of the year as some say? No. Let us not forget that the same year released another Twilight movie, Battleship, Snow White and the Huntsman, and The Lorax. Was it one of the best movies? Hell no. It was an average action flick. It was okay overall, I am not going to buy it on DVD anytime soon, but I had fun. And it was a major relief for someone who thought he was going to see a movie that would ruined the original for him. It is a movie where instead of hoping for a good movie, it was more of “I will take best of what I can get.” Which is what I got from this movie.
Anyone who has seen my Top 50 Favorite Movies list knows I love the 1984 film Red Dawn. Not only is it on my list, it is my second favorite film of all time; ranking above movies made by greats such as Kurosawa and Kubrick. I love it that much. It is a movie about a group of teenagers who fight off Soviet forces who invade America and they have to fight them off in a guerrilla war that is like The Battle of the Algiers meets the violence of the final scene of The Wild Bunch. As such a fan of the original, when I heard of that a remake was in the making, I was VERY worried.
Remakes can be great movies when put in good hands and done right. In fact Cape Fear by Martin Scorsese with De Niro, Juliette Lewis, and Nick Nolte is one of my favorite movies and in my opinion is better than the original. A good remake needs to be put in the hands of a legitimate and proven film maker, have a good cast of very good actors, should reflect the original movies message and or themes, have a few call backs to the original, and the source material should not be considered a classic. Fail to do this and you end up with the Planet of the Apes remake by Tim Burton, which is a movie I really hate.
With these thoughts in mind, I followed the film’s details closely online. What first caught my attention was that Chris Hemsworth was going to play Jed Eckert. This was really good news for me since I thought he was great in Thor and The Avengers and was the only good thing about the sh!tty snow white movie he was in. However the rest of the news I read was far from good. Chris was the only name on the credits who stood out as being in good films. The rest of the cast were either people I did not know, where in films and TV shows I had not and would not check out, or were in films I had seen but were pretty bad. The most notable of this was Isabel Lucas who was the transformer who could imitate humans in that god awful Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen movie, and Adrianne Palicki who was in the infamous NBC Wonder Woman pilot which tried to make Wonder Woman a ruthless and violent vigilante anti hero. Not even kidding. So much for a great cast. In addition this was director Dan Bradley’s first feature film, which did not help increase my enthusiasm. And while the original Red Dawn is not going to be counted among film classics like The Wizard of Oz or The Godfather, it is a movie that is very much a product of its time. The movie is a film firmly set in the later years of the Cold War, and is set during among the more tense years. See my original Red Dawn review in my Top 50 list for more details. So doing a remake of a movie set in the Cold War, and setting it in modern times is not a good idea. Imagine trying to do a remake of Dr Strangelove set in the modern day without the Russkies. Sounds like a terrible idea right? The original concept of the movie had potential to give us an almost equally imposing enemy for the modern movie. It was to be an invasion by the Chinese coming to collect on defaulted US loans. A very large and imposing military force and the second most notable and brutal Communist country had great potential to be the big bad and powerful enemy this movie needed. However that was cut after the film wrapped. In June of 2010 the movie changes China as the films enemy and replaced it with North Korea. This was done because MGM was in financial difficulty and they wanted to continue to have access to the very lucrative Chinese markets, so the Chinese were replaced with the North Koreans and called for lots of CGI to replace North Korean flags over the Chinese ones, and some additional edits. And to top it off, the involvement of John Milius the original co-writer and directer of the first film seemed nonexistent.
These cons aside there was still hope and it came in the strangest form. When reviews started to come out, they were overwhelmingly negative. That actually gave me hope. The original Red Dawn is not a critical darling, and received mixed reviews at the time of release. So the fact that it was not liked by critics was actually a good sign. One of the negative reviews was by Drew Hunt of the Chicago Reader who could not even get through the first sentence of his review without a Tea Party reference. But my favorite review was by Joe Niccum of the Kansas City Star who said flat out that the only people who would like this movie were secessionists and militia members. Let’s face it, if this movie is getting these kinds of reviews from film critics, then it had a very good chance of capturing the original feel of the first film, and was the best show of promise I had seen since Hemsworth's casting. But even then I was still very worried and I did not get my hopes up.
Right before I went to see the movie I stopped off at my local comic book store to pick up a few issues, I chatted a bit with the guy who works there. The last words I spoke before I left was “Let’s see how bad they can f**k up one of my favorite movies.” I got my ticket and sat in the theater with the mindset that I was going to HATE this movie. So how was the movie? I thought it was actually pretty good. Nowhere near as good as the original, but as far as remakes go I thought it was one of the good ones.
The movie captured my attention in the opening scene, where the filmmaker takes a page from the Dawn of the Dead remake and sets up the film in a series of media clips and news stories that show the film is set in a world where a new ultra-nationalist regime has taken over Russia and has become the new sugar daddy to North Korea in the way of arms and military equipment. It also shows a massive cyber war to feel out weaknesses in US defenses. The movie then cuts to Washington state where we meet the Eckerts at a high school football game where Matt Eckert is the quarterback. We set up the characters, who they are and their relationships. And at about the ten minute mark we see North Korean paratroopers dropping into the suburbs, hence starting the action. The movie captured the same feel and was faithful to the same themes of patriotism, loyalty to friends and family, and comradeship the original had. It also captured the same feel as the first movie with a few call backs to the original. Most notably was when one of the teenagers raised his SAW to the sky and cried “WOLVERINES.” This moment was able to get me to the same emotional high I had during the original scene from the first movie. It was at this point where I thought to myself “they are actually doing a pretty good job.” They did add a few twists to certain call backs like with the deer blood scene. This kept the film feeling fresh and not recycled. In addition Matt Eckert gets a much bigger character arc in this move then in the original. And despite the rather weak casting, they actually do pretty good jobs.
But this movie does have its flaws. Very glaring flaws. Most notable is that an invasion by North Korea is not very feasible. If North Korea is going to invade anywhere, they are going to invade South Korea, if they are going to do anything to the US, it will be nuclear. In the original movie the vehicles for the Russians were painstakingly recreated for the film with a Kubrick level of attention to detail. In this movie the North Koreans are running around in US humvees, which is incredibly lazy. The action is shot in the shacky cam, and that can get a tad distracting, and not as good as the action scenes shot by Milius. In addition there is no character equivalent to Colonel Bella from the first movie, leaving the enemy force without a human face to it. And finally the movie is WAY to Marine Corp for me. As an infantryman in the US Army we have a healthy relationship with Marines in much the same way two brothers do. We will talk massive amounts of ***** to each other and deride one another like it is no tomorrow in order to claim superiority. But we are ultimately on the same team. But that being said the USMC stuff in this movie is so over done that it made me sick. In addition the fact that a Command Sergeant Major was actually leading a team into enemy territory made me laugh! When you reach that rank you are an office guy and an overseer, not a field leader. Also one critical scene was changed from the original where Daryl betrays the Wolverines. In the original he was a traitor, in this movie he is basically low jacked which robs the movie of a lot of tragedy. Another scene left out of the movie was when the Eckert boys visit their father in a reeducation camp. taking out an equally powerful scene from the movie and replaced it with a half assed execution. And finally while I said the acting on the part of the cast was fine, the look they had screamed “pretty teenagers playing soldier.” The cast of the original movie outside of Charlie Sheen, Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey looked like normal teenagers, and did not look like a bunch of models or actors ripped from the Disney channel.
But overall I still say I enjoyed the movie. Given the cards it was dealt, this movie could have been WAY worse then it turned out. It has its flaws yes, but there were positive aspects to the film I enjoyed. Is it the worst movie of the year as some say? No. Let us not forget that the same year released another Twilight movie, Battleship, Snow White and the Huntsman, and The Lorax. Was it one of the best movies? Hell no. It was an average action flick. It was okay overall, I am not going to buy it on DVD anytime soon, but I had fun. And it was a major relief for someone who thought he was going to see a movie that would ruined the original for him. It is a movie where instead of hoping for a good movie, it was more of “I will take best of what I can get.” Which is what I got from this movie.