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Like so many recent remakes, Red Dawn lives almost entirely in the shadow of its predecessor. John Milius’s 1984 film about the Soviet invasion of the U.S. has become a kind of cult classic and, in hindsight, a near-perfect distillation of American culture during the early ‘80s Cold War. Swapping out the now-defunct Soviet Union for North Korea (originally China until the producers got cold feet about too clearly provoking Asia’s largest film market), the 2012 version ramps up the action while dutifully mimicking the original in most other respects.
The new version shifts the location from Colorado to Washington State, where Jed Eckert (Chris Hemsworth) returns home on leave from the Marines. One night, the power goes out across town, and the next morning the residents wake up to gunshots, explosions, and the sight of hundreds of paratroopers filling the skies. Jed and teenage brother Matt (Josh Peck) round up a few of their friends in the chaos and escape to their cabin in the nearby mountains, where, under Jed’s leadership, they begin to fight back against the North Koreans in a series of guerrilla strikes, taking the name of their high school mascot, the Wolverines.
Director Dan Bradley comes from a background in stunt direction, and it shows. The action set pieces are both clear and exciting, and the cast mostly sells the idea that a handful of teenagers could take on a professional military machine. Hemsworth fares a bit better than Peck, whose slackerish sensibility served him much better in The Wackness. There are also a couple of decent supporting character performances, including turns by The Hunger Games’s Josh Hutcherson and Friday Night Lights’s Adrianne Palicki. Each has enjoyed a much higher profile since making this film, and that potential is evident if not fully utilized here.
The original Red Dawn was kind of a big, melodramatic mess, but it played so well to the cultural themes of the time that it stuck around in people’s consciousness. It mixed the fear of the Cold War with the prominence of youth culture and an admiration for good old American rural practicality in a way that felt new at the time. By attempting to replicate that mix rather than truly update it, the new Red Dawn suffers because audiences have seen it all before. As good as some of the actors are here, it’s still a cast of improbably attractive twenty-somethings (playing teenagers, of course) saying and doing improbable things. But for the (slightly) higher budget, you’d be forgiven for thinking you’d stumbled into a show on the CW.
The new Red Dawn occasionally glances at a greater relevance, but it never musters up the courage to fully embrace it. As with the nationality of the invaders, too often the film feels like it’s afraid to commit to any but the most basic of themes, in order not to risk offending. Even the home video release consists of just the film with no commentary or special features—unusual for a major studio project with some history behind it. I suppose if they did, it would just serve to remind people that some remakes really are just unnecessary.
