Red Dawn Remake-Re'Do Promted By An Upset China

Red Dawn Remake – Our Review and Reflections

August 4, 2012

Last summer, Racebending.com staffers attended a promotional screening for MGM’s remake of the film Red Dawn. Now that the Red Dawn trailer has been released in theaters, we’re posting our review. This review is going to be based on the version of the film we saw in summer 2011.
Red Dawn (2012) is a remake of the film by the same name released in 1984 during the Cold War. In the original film, the Soviet Union, Cubans, and Nicaraguans invade American soil. A group of American high school students, calling themselves the “Wolverines” (their high school mascot) resist the Soviet-led occupation using guerilla warfare tactics. The plot of Red Dawn (2012) is similar, but this time the invaders are “North Korean.”
The version of the film we got to see looked finalized, but again, we saw this film over a year before it’s planned release, back in summer 2011. Ostensibly, this screening was held to gauge whether audiences would be receptive to changes that the studio made to preemptively appease investors in China. Using CGI, the film’s Chinese invasion was changed to be a North Korean invasion. To the filmmakers, the Chinese and North  Koreans were interchangable.


Set images from when the film was still about Chinese invaders   As far as we could tell from the version we were screened, the transition from Chinese villains to North Korean villains was complete. The lines spoken by Korean American actor Will Yun Lee’s Chinese villain, General Lo, were dubbed over from Mandarin to Korean. The expository prologue had been seemingly edited to explain a North Korean invasion, and signs and flags were changed from PRC to DPRK.
How was the movie? Well, the good news is that, Red Dawn has more Asian faces and Asian American actors in it than any other film coming out this Thanksgiving weekend. They’re just depicting yellow peril invaders!