Remaking Red Dawn

Can John Milius' Cold War Classic Be Improved On?

One of the things Hollywood likes to do to avoid taking risks on new ideas and new stories is to remake old, classic movies. Usually this sort of thing ends badly, with the new product being inferior to the old. But MGM has an intriguing idea to remake that 80s classic Red Dawn.

Red Dawn, for those who have forgotten, was a film directed by John Milius, one of the few openly right wing directors in Hollywood, that depicted the invasion of the United States by the Soviet Red Army and efforts by a rag tag group of high school students in Colorado to resist the Communist hordes. Red Dawn starred such future stars such as Patrick Swayze, Jennifer Grey, Lea Thompson, and Charlie Sheen. Powers Booth played a downed fighter pilot. Ron O'Neal played a sympathetic Cuban officer.

Red Dawn was universally panned by liberal film critics, but nevertheless found a good sized audience and remains a cult classic, even decades after the Reagan 1980s when it was first released. Red Dawn had the virtue of being both a good action film and a meditation on the horrors of war.

Still, Red Dawn would seem to be an odd film for politically correct Hollywood to want to remake. Despite its realistic depiction of guerilla war, Red Dawn did suggest that there were good guys (the Americans) and bad guys (the invading Communists) and that in the end the good guys won. Red Dawn is also an odd idea for a remake because the Cold War with Russia is long over. The current enemy consists of the Islamo Fascists, who do not, by and large, use massed armies to fight the Infidel.

There are, it would seem, two ways to remake Red Dawn. One would be to make it an alternate history story, depicting a rather different history than the one that ended in the triumph of democracy and free market capitalism over the Soviet Empire. In a sense, the original Red Dawn is already alternate history of that sort.