criterionforum.org

In case anybody was thinking that the remake of Red Dawn would somehow not be as bad as the trailers make it seem or at least not any worse, think again. It's a travesty by any measure and won't be pleasing to fans of the original or most anyone else. The worst sins of the remake are all of the many details that have been pointlessly and carelessly altered or "updated" showing how little of the appeal and effectiveness of Milius film anyone involved in this one understood. J. Hoberman wrote that it "feels like a trailer for its own video game." I'd add that it's a crappy video game at that.

The way it's shot you can barely follow the action. I'm not talking about Bourne-style shaky cam. I'm talking about pell-mell coverage where you don't understand where anyone is in space and so you can't see the progress of a scene or anticipate any of the danger the characters might find themselves in. There are no set pieces. Action scenes begin abruptly with little to no set-up. People start shooting, people run, it's over before you've been able to grasp what's happening or care why. My viewing companion noticed something strange and telling about the film's credits. This Red Dawn seems to have no actual attributable editor. "Additional editor," yes. "Assistants," sure. But no editor of record! Which means either that s/he had his/her name taken off the picture and/or there were many more hands cutting away too, multiple editing doctors who wanted no credit for this heaping mess either.

But the action direction is just a symptom of the poor storytelling overall, which starts with an awful script full of cardboard characters accomplishing everything far too easily with no consequences -- except when they are scheduled structurally at the end of the second act. Nobody learns anything with difficulty or meaning. The group doesn't become guerillas out of necessity or with sacrifice and struggle but by whim and by montage. When people finally start dying there's hardly shock and it seems to register as lightly with the surviving characters as it does with us.

The casting is unimaginative and lazy. Chrises Hemsworth and Cooper are wasted. And everybody else is good looking in a bland second-tier network teen show kind of way, all the airbrushed cheerleader girls sporting perfect make-up and hair throughout, never braking a nail on their AKs.... Nobody looks like an actual teenager and the two central brothers don't look believably related.

I don't even want to get into all the ways the film failed to embrace and re-imagine its considerably more urban combat sceanrios. Milius was reputedly inspired by The Battle of Algiers, among other films. One wonders if anyone at work on this one had ever heard of it. And Hemsworth's Jed is supposed to be a veteran of urban warfare in Iraq!

And don't even get me started on the embarrassingly bad VFX or the results of the much covered decision to switch the invading army from Chinese (really ridiculous) to North Korean (full on ludicrous). You can still see vestiges of Chinese occupation symbols/banners, which have an entirely different color scheme, in the backgrounds of dozens of shots that I suppose the producers thought nobody would notice or care about. That's about the level of respect for the audience that went into this turd.

Caught this myself in a multiplex marathon on Wednesday and found it just as ludicrous as you you but not quite bad enough to be entertaining. Was this at all a result of the writers strike a few years back because to call this script hackneyed would be an understatement. There were a few choice bad lines that had me laughing throughout the rest of the day: a marine frequently calling people 'mo-tard' (what the hell is that?) and Josh Hutcherson robbing a Subway shop and screaming with an Uzi and garbage bag in hand, "Sandwich artist! Fill this with bread!"

Professor Wagstaff wrote:Caught this myself in a multiplex marathon on Wednesday and found it just as ludicrous as you you but not quite bad enough to be entertaining. Was this at all a result of the writers strike a few years back because to call this script hackneyed would be an understatement. There were a few choice bad lines that had me laughing throughout the rest of the day: a marine frequently calling people 'mo-tard' (what the hell is that?) and Josh Hutcherson robbing a Subway shop and screaming with an Uzi and garbage bag in hand, "Sandwich artist! Fill this with bread!"

Those are good lines to highlight the few (un)intentional chuckles on tap. But man, the vast majority of the dialogue is worse than everything else and totally devoid of even accidental humor or inspiration. Take the central speech that Jed (Hemsworth) is supposed to use to rally his troops, the one that gets reprised by his bro in the final moments. I can't believe any writer turning that thing in didn't get fired on the spot or that the director, actors, etc. couldn't instantly have improvised something far better on the set. So your strike thesis makes a certain amount of sense, but it alone can't begin to explain away the awfulness.

As for "motard," Urban Dictionary seems to think it's a supermotivated Marine, who's always annoyingly gung -ho no matter how bad the situation gets, like a more modern version of the Vietnam era "gungy." Still, the way it was used in the film betrayed the tin ear of everyone involved for this kind of insider slang.