Racist For Pay: The New Red Dawn Undergoes Some Changes

In John Milius’ original Red Dawn, from 1984 though that’s no excuse, the baddies were the Soviet miltary, portrayed invading the United States. When word on the remake came along, I was a touch surprised to hear that the Chinese were in to replace the Russians as the big baddies. I had been expecting a super force of Muslim Extremists or, even more probably, North Korea.

I wasn’t basing this on any “real world” notion of which invading force would be the most likely to hit the States, but on who I thought mainstream US filmmakers would most likely want to portray as EVIL.

Well, according to The LA Times, it seems like I was just ahead of the curve. Now that the film has come down from the frigid MGM shelf and is being readied for release, its villains are being changed through costly digital FX. After the touch ups have been done, the Chinese are going to be out and film will be filled with murderous North Koreans.

See the set picture at the top of this story? All of that business is going to need painting over, or maybe even cutting out.

But why put North Korea in the frame and not China? The article tells us that the studio’s motivation is monetary. As MGM look for a studio to release the film, they’re finding a lot of hesitance. Nobody wants to offend the Chinese and get their future films locked out that lucrative marketplace. There’s no chance of squeezing dollars out of North Korea, however, so they’re going to have to take the brunt instead.

So, to spell it out: the film’s portrayal of the invading forces is indistinct and meaningless enough that you can just replace a few lines of dialogue, paint out some Chinese tropes and replace them with North Korean ones and then, hey presto, you’ve changed the Boogeyman’s base of operations.

The studio definitely seem to understand real-world differences between North Korea and China, seeing as these are what govern the film’s possible release in one country while not in the other, but they’re still happy to churn out politically blunt and ill-defined fantasies in which two entirely different countries, not to mention their distinct ideologies, are interchangeable.

I wasn’t expecting this film to be very comfortable anyway, but now I’m frightened I’ll find it quite stomach churning. There’s a chance, if only a small one, that the anti-Chinese fantasy of the film as intended was a sincere bit of nonsense, in the way that the Soviet-bashing of Milius’ original was, but there’s no mystery about the fixed-up do-over. It’s plain that North Korea are getting slotted in for purely commercial reasons.