From Whiskey Fire we see that “MGM is thinking about remaking Red Dawn.” Naturally, this arouses the denizens at Libertas, and causes heavily armed high school boys to pitch a pup tent in Dirty Harry’s shorts:
As with any remake we could spend days talking about how they will screw this up (and they will), but think about how great it could be – it won’t be great because that might help Bush — but having an army of Iranian backed Islamo-Nazis occupy a part of the United States would not only be a rip-roaring action yarn but also an important reminder of the evil ideology we’re fighting.
The whole movie should be an allegory about the hell Obama has promised to unleash on the Iraqi people should he win the election. Great stories ask and answer what if…? What if we abandoned millions of innocents to Iranian backed jihadists? What if we abandoned them because it was just too hard to liberate them? What if, thanks to weak-kneed liberal politicians, those millions of innocents fed into a meat grinder were Americans?
In my hands it would be set in Manhattan because an island’s easier for the terrorists to defend and chock-full of appeasers in desperate need of a wake-up call. The scene with a herd of Greenwich Village liberals being shoved into burqas writes itself.
Is war the answer now, punk? Oh, it is? Good. Then why isn’t it when the people are brown-skinned foreigners?
Which is why the Iraq war, while a strategic military disaster, has been a masterpiece of social conditioning. We immunize ourselves against charges of racism and imperialism by defending brown-skinned foreigners while accustoming our young men and women to the task of killing brown-skinned foreigners. It’s like softening our hands while we do the dishes! “Blood? You’re soaking in it! HA ha ha ha ha!”
Anyway. This will all come in handy when we make our final stand against the endless brown waves of the Reconquista (as one Libertas commenter points out.)
If you’ve read , you know that Red Dawn occupies a special place in our hearts, since it’s the only film to which we devoted an entire chapter. And I share its fans’ anxiety that this classic film, so beautifully evocative of its time and place, may be spoiled by efforts to crudely “update” the picture and make it more “relevant” for today’s audience by tossing in anachronisms such as MP3 players, visible bra straps, and Negroes. And really, what would be the point of even trying, since as Libertas reader Troy observes, modern kids are too stupid to appreciate the subtlety of a John Milius movie:
It’s not going to be too difficult to “re-educate” a youth populace that is constantly under the drone of iPod headphones, thinks MySpace is the OED, has a 9th grade reading level (a tad below our Founding documents, Federalist, Gettysburg Address, I Have a Dream, all the greats of Western lit. — not to mention a little book called the Bible), types with its thumbs deep thoughts like “BFF”; “K”; and “LOL”. Of course — they have been playing Call of Duty 4; Grand Theft Auto, et al. so they may have some skilz.
DH — Manhattan is the exact wrong place to set it. Not even Snake Plissken wants to die to save Manhattan. We would just cordon it off and turn it into Gitmo North.
Red Dawn is a redneck shining moment. Folks between the Appalachians and the Sierra Nevada (on balance) do the fighting and dying for this country. I love The Wolverines, but maybe they could change the high school mascot to The Crusaders.
What are the odds that this Red Dawn will be a high school version of V for Vendetta? Remember Remember the 11th of September… as the day GW Bush took over.
Or perhaps the Mexican invasion and the war for Aztlan?
I remember when I first tried to rent Red Dawn at Blockbuster, the clerk warned me that in order to really understand the movie I’d require a thorough grounding in the Western canon, with a particular emphasis on the major works of the Scottish Enlightenment, and the Federalist Papers, 16 through 31.
Plus, as another commenter reflects, today’s polluted cultural environment would only serve to exacerbate the film’s few tiny flaws:
There was a scene in Red Dawn – I can barely remember the movie because I was like 7 or 8 when I saw it on VHS – where a Russian soldier gets the drop on one of the wolverine kids. He has his gun trained on them and is about to kill them when he realizes that they’re just kids and his *humanity* boils over and spares the kid. (Do you guys recall that scene? Am I mistaken?)
Well, if Red Dawn does get remade, trust me, you; the movie will have that scene as the heart of its message.
“One person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter” will be the sickening theme. Count me out.
Now that’s some white hot irony, fresh from the smelter. Or as Thers observes of Dirty (and this apparently goes for his readers as well):
Mr. Harry seems more than a little confused as to just who’s shouting “Wolverines!” or the local equivalent over there in Iraq nowadays.
But even though America clearly needs a lesson in the vital importance of defending while killing brown-skinned foreigners, the liberals in Hollywood won’t let it happen:
I think Troy’s on to something. Since “Red” now means exactly the opposite of what it used to, the evil Reds in the remake will be “Red Staters” striking out against freedom loving True Patriots whose dissent, devotion to “choice” and incontinent onanism are proof of their true claim to the title “American.”
I’m not sure this pitch is quite high concept enough, since an army of Midwesterners invading Manhattan, armed with tickets to “Xanadu” and reservations at the Times Square ESPN Zone — while horrifying — is something New Yorkers have come to face with the same fatalism that you see in Kansans following a tornado or a locust attack.
Wow. When I read that first chunk of text, I thought you were making it up. I mean, “an army of Iranian backed Islamo-Nazis”? That sounds like a hack political comedian trying ham-handedly to mimic the tone of the right-Blogosphere. Tragically, it’s all true. I can only assume that the comments are authentic as well (I’m NOT going back over there to check).
Left by D Johnston on May 19th, 2008