Our aim at World O' Crap has always been entertainment, not education, and yet -- as humanity seems to teeter on the edge of a precipice -- it is useful to recall that George Bernard Shaw believed great art not only could, but indeed must, be didactic. Which brings me to Red Dawn. Not, not that one, the other one.
When Sheri and I wrote Better Living Through Bad Movies, we climaxed the whole thing with a chapter on Red Dawn, that 1984 paean to Reagan-era priapism, in which an armada of Russians, Cubans, and Nicaraguans subdue the United States. The vaunted U.S. military proves useless, undoubtedly due to budget cuts, leaving the task of repulsing the invaders to a rag-tag band of American teenagers. But even they are woefully ill-equipped, and for much of the movie can only respond to Russian artillery fire with nocturnal emissions.
When it came time to release the audiobook version, we added some bonus features, including a review of the 2012 remake of Red Dawn, because it operated from an even more ludicrous premise: that the United States gets bullied and geo-politically pants'd by North Korea.
I don't know, it seemed hilarious last year. But since satire has now become current events, we better prepare by taking this peek at Kim Jong-un's battle plan.
First, however, a bit of background:
In 2009 MGM remade Red Dawn, replacing Patrick Swayze with
Chris Hemsworth, and the defunct Soviet Union with the People’s Republic of
China. But the studio had financial problems, and then a change of heart about
offending the world’s second largest market for movies, so the picture sat on
the shelf for three years. Eventually they used dubbing and digital effects to
change the villain, and now instead of China, the United States gets invaded
and conquered by…North Korea. Which has an interesting effect on the narrative;
I mean Red Dawn has always been a
David and Goliath story, but in this version, we’re the guy who gets hit in the head with a rock.
Red
Dawn (2012)
Director by Dan Bradley
Written by Carl Ellsworth and Jeremy Passmore,
based on the 1984 screenplay by John Milius and Kevin Reynolds
Global tensions are high; the American
military is deployed to hot spots all over the world, leaving the homeland
undefended; and North Korean is threatening to destroy our entire country.
Granted, that feels a bit like getting the hem of your Wranglers gnawed on by a
teacup Chihuahua, but as various panicky cable news anchors remind us, North
Korea is the fourth largest army in the world, behind the Peoples Liberation
Army of China, the U.S. Army, the KISS Army, and Armie Hammer.
We're watching a high school football
game in Spokane, where Chris Hemsworth, a marine on leave from Iraq, has come
to watch his brother, Josh Peck, lead the Wolverines to defeat. Later, Chris
goes to a bar, where he gets hit on by Adrianne Palicki (from – oddly enough – Friday Night Lights) whose idea of a
saucy pick-up line is to remind Chris that he used to babysit her, and that he
has a dead mom. And while we can’t see his crotch in this shot, Chris’s eyes
tell us that with her clumsy attempt at flirtation, Adrianne has just committed
an act of premeditated bonercide.
There's a blackout, and everybody goes
home. The next day, Chris and Josh awaken to see the sky filled with computer
generated North Koreans. They jump in their Dodge truck and run into a bunch of
stuff, until they literally run into their Dad, who's a cop. He repeatedly
orders them to "get to the cabin!", which I like to think is the
movie's subtle way of telling us, "if you have to see a Chris Hemsworth film, why don't you go watch Cabin in the Woods instead?"
You know what? I think the movie’s
right. What do you say we turn this crap off right now and head for Redbox.
Who's with me?!
No one?
Fine...
You know, sometimes I think you people want me to suffer.
Josh insists they pick up his hot
blonde girlfriend, but when they get to her house they find the Korean invaders
are rounding up all the cheerleaders. So they drive off in a screaming panic, in
the process collecting a convoy of soon-to-be-recognizable actors (that other
Josh from Hunger Games), already
forgotten legacy-celebrities (Connor Cruise, adopted son of Tom Cruise and
Nicole Kidman), a trigger-happy, argumentative dick named Pete who -- I'm
calling it now -- will betray our heroes to the North Koreans before long; plus
Adrianne, some male models for cannon fodder, and a pretty Latina named Julie,
because even though it's wartime there are still labor laws, and somebody will
eventually have to spell Adrianne on the vagina shift.
The next day, Chris and Josh go look at
the town while their voices – dubbed in post production when the studio decided
they couldn’t make the bad guys Chinese -- assure us the thought of North Korea
conquering the west coast is crazy! But so
crazy it just might work! Then they
go back to the cabin and find that Pete has stolen all their breakfast cereal
and betrayed them to the Koreans. Even worse, our designated villain, Captain
Cho, has captured Connor Cruise's dad, the mayor, and Chris and Josh's dad, the
cop. The mayor takes a bullhorn and tries to lure the boys out of the woods,
but Cop Dad, who's playing the Harry Dean Stanton role, points at Cho and
commands the boys to "go to war with this piece for shit!"
Cho looks at one of his soldiers with
an expression that seems to say, "Did this bitch really just call me a piece of shit?" The soldier gives him a nod that says
"you know it, girlfriend", and Cho pulls his pistol and recreates
that famous photo of the Saigon police chief shooting a Vietcong in the head.
So I guess it takes being invaded by North Koreans to make North Americans empathize
with the North Vietnamese.
The next day, Chris's truck is bogged
down in a creek bed. All the characters get out and push, but the wheels just
spin uselessly in the mud, which is a pretty good visual metaphor for the plot.
Since nobody's going anywhere they decide to kill time with an argument. Hunger
Games wants to go home to his parents until Adrianne says, Oh. Hey. I forgot to
tell you, they're dead. Chris gives a speech about how they're going to fight
and become fleas; and while they may only be larvae now, if they work hard they
will soon pupate and become parasites who will make the big dog that is North
Korea feel itchy. Which is all well and good, but I kind of liked it in the
first film when they cried "Wolverines!", and I'm not sure it'll have
the same effect when they thrust their AR-15s skyward and shout
"Fleas!"
Ready for a training montage? Wait,
there's more: ready for the World's Dullest Training Montage? Okay then, let's
join the Fleas as they take shorthand, learn to parallel park, and roll around
in leaf mold. After thirty-four seconds of boot camp, they start ambushing
Korean soldiers and stealing their lunch money. But Hunger Games pukes while
corpse-robbing, so Chris and Josh make him shoot a deer and drink its blood,
because when remaking even a stupid movie, filmmakers should try to honor its
legacy and its fans by including the stupidest part. But they do update the
moment for a modern audience, because this time the sacred act of communion
between hunter and prey turns out to be a frat-style prank. I'm surprised they
didn't hand him a Sharpie and make him draw a dick on the dead deer's forehead.
The Fleas go on the offensive, bombing
the Koreans with explosive skateboards and commandeering sliced turkey from
Subway. But Josh can't stop lurking around Cheerleader Concentration Camp to
peep on his imprisoned girlfriend. Chris tells him he’s endangering the Fleas,
but Josh has an idea for how to end the war, and it’s a plan that does the
impossible: it’s vague and incredibly complicated at the same time.
But the Fleas seem to know what they're
doing, and what they're doing is failing, because in the middle of it Josh
spots his girlfriend and runs off to save her. The one Latino flea doesn’t get
any lines but he does get killed, and Chris sustains a wound that requires him
to take off his shirt and get stitched up without anesthetic, because he got
his Patrick Swayze movies mixed up and thought he was in a remake of ROAD
HOUSE.
Girlfriend tells them a Russian spetznaz unit has been brought in to
handle the Fleas, because that's what happened in the first movie. Then a North
Korean general arrives to shout at Captain Cho, but because the characters were
originally Chinese and the dialogue has been dubbed into Korean, everyone is
subtitled and still out of sync. It
may be the best thing in the movie, and after the General storms out, Cho and
his aide exchange fraught looks that seem to say, "Did you understand a
word he just said?" "No, I don't even understand what I’m saying."
Three Marines show up, led by Jeffrey
Dean Morgan, who's pulled the Power Boothe shift, and explains the plot: the
North Koreans destroyed our electrical grid and communications with an EMP,
which allowed them to conquer the entire West Coast, because our morale
plummeted without access to Internet porn and Pokemon Go. But Captain Cho keeps
a radio-telephone in a suitcase, and if the Fleas can steal it, they’ll win the
war. Which seems stupid, but I assume everyone agreed to the rules before they
started, so whatever.
They sneak into the Police Department,
steal the radio, and Chris shoots Cho in the face. They go back to the hideout
to celebrate, but the Koreans interrupt Miller Time by shooting Chris in the
back. Seeing his brother's brains spattered all over the six pack changes Josh,
and he immediately turns into the greatest guerrilla general since Ho Chi Minh.
He leads the Fleas to safety in a Country Squire station wagon, then goes on a
grand tour of occupied America, making speeches and recruiting Scabies, Crotch
Crabs, Deer Ticks -- a whole army of
patriotic parasites. The End.
So what is this version of Red Dawn trying to tell us? Well, we
think it offers an important lesson about bullying. Suppose a classmate was
intimidating your child on the playground. You could complain to the school,
give your kid a few self-defense pointers, or do what we’d do and show them Red Dawn, which demonstrates that while
anyone can be bullied, anyone can also be
a bully.
Even America, the world’s richest
nation, can be successfully beaten up by one of the world’s poorest. So the
moral of the story is, if you see a poor person, punch them hard, then run
away. And by teaching this lesson to children, it also teaches us, as adults,
that it’s probably a good thing we don’t have children.
Additionally, Red Dawn illustrates the rule that casting a hunky but unknown
Australian in your movie won’t help get it released; but if you let him ripen
on the shelf for three years, he’ll turn into Thor. Or he’ll get black and
squishy like an avocado, in which case you should just put your film in a
Cuisinart and make guacamole (serves 6 to 8 persons, bores 10 to 12).
Perhaps the biggest difference between
the Red Dawns is that the 1984 film
was very concerned about guns, and the temperature of the hands that held them.
But that’s a quaint artifact from a less heavily armed period in America’s
history, when sweet old granny’s still kept cut-glass dishes full of ribbon
candy on their coffee tables instead of bowls of bullets.
In the 2012 Red Dawn, guns are abundant, but patriots freak the hell out
because the North Koreans turned off their wifi. And unlike Patrick Swayze and
Charlie Sheen, who spent much of their movie hijacking ammo and AK-47s and
fighting a guerilla war against the Soviets, Chris and the Fleas lay down their
lives to get the one working electronic device that will finally allow them to
check in on Grindr.
This reflects an important change not
only in social values, but military tactics, and if this trend continues, the
next war will dispense with tanks, aircraft, and infantry, and be fought virtually,
and by proxy. So start training up those Pokémon now.
For me, though, the main lesson we can take from the Red Dawn remake is that Yes, It Can Happen Here. If Kim Jong-un precedes his invasion by knocking out Twitter, Trump will be effectively muzzled, unable to communicate with his generals, or tweet excuses to his followers about how this whole invasion thing is the Democrats fault, and have you tried the chocolate cake?
So get used to being run by Poppin Fresh with a flattop, America.
(Sure, he may kill you, but if you press his belly, he giggles!)
