Red Dawn 2012 Remake Movie Review

Red Dawn is proof that Americans can make really awful movies too and they don’t even need a washed up senator (like we do) in boots and a leather tunic to top bill. They’re perfectly capable of crafting awfulness with legitimate Hollywood actors.

There is no redeeming value to it. I realized that the moment North Korean soldiers dropped from the sky like giant snowflakes of aggression. In good fiction, there is such a thing as an element of plausibility within a story’s contextual boundaries. Red Dawn does not pretend to posses such an element. We are forced to believe that the enemy is able to cripple the systems of what would be modern day America, enough to render their lightning attack undetected.

The movie is a remake of a 1984 hit, but the original paints a far more believable story, placing events in the context of crumbling international relations and global political unrest. North Korea may seem like a logical choice for the adaptation’s antagonist but there is little to suggest that the rest of the world was so engrossed watching Lady Gaga split her pants that no one suspected what was going to happen.

The threat of real world North Korea is slightly more believable and disturbing. They’ve already said that if they were to attack America, it would be with long range nuclear missiles, not paratroopers in flying lanterns.

The forced conflict is not the only loose screw in the story. There’s also the grating drama between lead characters, the Eckert brothers. We were required to often pause between action scenes to watch one brother or the other stare into space and brood over the past while it was the other brother’s turn to flex his jaw muscles and look teary-eyed. If they were aiming to tug at my heartstrings, they missed it by a few inches and tugged at my gallbladder instead.

Then there’s the sad casting of Josh Hutcherson. Just because he convincingly portrayed a wimp in The Hunger Games does not mean he should now have monopoly over all wimpy characters. Poor Josh. I can imagine him now in his old age accepting a lifetime achievement award for consistently portraying wimps.

I suppose the only one we can forgive for being in this movie is Chris Hemsworth and that’s just because he’s cool as Thor.