Tuesday, December 4, 2012

REVIEW - Red Dawn

Despite all the negative reviews of Red Dawn, I went to see it last night.

First, those reviews were mostly well-founded.

Like a lot of other people, it left me asking a few important questions:

- Why would the North Koreans bother invading the US, only to target Tacoma, Washington?
- And why North Korea? The makers originally planned for the invaders to be the Chinese military. During the production however, they realized that people in China buy a lot of movie tickets. So they switched their focus to North Korea, a country that allegedly couldn't organize much more than an argument, let alone an invasion.
- Why did the US armed forces not bother to respond? The brief statement that "most of the regular US Military was away from the country on various deployments" is a cop out.
- Why would anyone expect a bunch of teens to have any effect on the invading forces?
- How could the walkie talkies the teens had escape from being fritzed along with all other electronics? Eh?
- Why bother to remake a movie that had a minor impact when it was first released, back in 1984?

I bet a lot of these faults are true of that original version, but to not fix them in a remake is inexcusable.

If you suspend belief for ninety minutes, the film is OK. But if you're prepared to do that, you'd also find most of Jennifer Aniston's movies watchable.

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