Avenge Meeee!!!!

Red Dawn Remade

In 1984, I saw Red Dawn in the theater... several times.  It instantly became a favorite and lead me to become serious about being a survivalist.  Like a many high school boys of the era, I fancied myself an honorary Wolverine, keeping my 94 Winchester and Mossberg 500 with a pistol grip under my bed with my canvas GI surplus pack filled with ammo, my Ka-bar knife, a few cans of tuna and pork & beans, and a canteen with iodine tablets.  I daydreamed through my classes looking for Soviet and Cuban troops to parachute over the football field.  I've watched that movie many times since those days, and still enjoy it, and drop quotes into casual conversation on a regular basis.  If you haven't seen it, you really should.  It's a modern classic that inspired a whole generation of survivalists.

The rumors of a remake of Red Dawn have floated around for the last 10 years or so.  In 2008, at Cannes, the announcement was made that a remake was indeed in the works.  Filming began in 2009, with the invaders being the Chinese this time around.  In 2010, MGM announced that the release would be delayed due to their financial problems.  MGM is coming out of their restructuring, and it is anticipated that the movie will be released late in 2011 or early 2012... but...

It seems that the Chinese were offended by the premise that they would be the invaders.  There were numerous mentions in the Chinese press to that effect.  It also seems that MGM now has a great deal of their financial backing coming from the Chinese.  Hmmm.

In March of this year, it came out that MGM had gone back and changed the invaders.  They reshot the introduction, and digitally changed all the Chinese symbols, patches, flags, etc... to... get this... North Korea.

The producer said, "We were initially very reluctant to make any changes, but after careful consideration we constructed a way to make a scarier, smarter and more dangerous 'Red Dawn' that we believe improves the movie."

I'll go see the new Red Dawn, and I'm still looking forward to it, but I'm going to be incredulous about the whole North Korea thing.  "A billion screaming Chinamen..." sure, I can believe that.  A nuclear superpower, imperialistic growth across Africa and South America to gain natural resources, they even own a major US port thanks to Bill Clinton.  But North Korea?  It is a poverty stricken nation of only 24 million; famine has been recurrent since the mid-90s.  The navy has no blue water capability, and they only have 50 some cargo ships in their civil marine transport organization.  The air force is equally deficient, and they have only a dozen or so trans-oceanic aircraft.  They do have the suspected capabilities to build up to nine nuclear warheads, and have the technology to launch them to the US west coast, but you can't invade America with a couple of nukes.

We'll have to see how the movie turns out.  I think it would be much better with the Chinese being the invaders.  Survivalism is very "in" these days.  Will the release of this new version have a similar affect to an even bigger increase in practicing survivalists as the original produced?