Fridae

Produced at the height of Ronald Reagan's fearmongering against the Evil Empire, John Milius's (Conan the Barbarian, The Hunt for Red October) Red Dawn is a landmark in pop culture. Sure, the conservative movement took it as an endorsement of gun ownership and the militia movement while Milius got another chance to make a film with a gritty depiction of war and how it turns weak innocents into either numbed survivors or proud warriors. But a rewatch of this 1984 film may reveal something amazing: a subversive, even humanistic anti-war core, with the Soviet, Cuban and Nicaraguan liberator-occupiers realising they've stepped into their own Vietnam, waging a losing war for the hearts and minds of Americans — with all the consequent war-weariness, cynicism, and liberal regret that follow.

The remake of 2012 keeps most of the premise (America still folds like a card to an invading army, leaving a bunch of high school kids to start a guerilla movement) and main characters (Hemsworth and Peck take up the roles played by Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen). The script reworks the relationship between the Eckert brothers as played by Hemsworth (as the older, military brother) and Peck (the brash and emotional jock) to focus on the very simple, solitary idea that the experience of war and the duty of defending one's country from foreign invaders will turn immature boys into responsible men who will lay down their lives so that others may be free. On that count, the remake succeeds in what it sets to achieve.

Gone though is the rampant gore and body count of the original film (which achieved a record of sorts back in 1984), Milius's vision of war that is both noble and soul-destroying on both occupiers and guerilla fighters. Comparatively the new film instead feels like an exercise in straightforward paranoia and brings to mind General Douglas MacArthur's lament on how the United States government kept its people fearful to justify its bloated budgets: "Always...some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power...(which) seem never to have been quite real." What Doug could not have foreseen perhaps, is the way in which one day the entertainment industry would play this role instead.

Most damaging to the film is its creators' misguided decision to replace the PRC with the North Koreans as the invaders. Setting aside the obvious logic that only a continental power can be realistically invaded and occupied by another continental power (the 1984 invasion may have been headed by the Cubans but they were more than aided by Soviet manpower and hardware), the cowardly decision threatens to undermine the film's moral lesson of being courageous to stand up to powerful enemies.

Aside from this, Red Dawn is still the only war film worth watching in the cinemas for weeks to come.