Last weekend, the trailer was finally released for Red Dawn, a remake of the 1984 film of the same name. This version has spent a couple of years on MGM’s shelf due to a combination of the studio’s financial woes and the controversy concerning the film’s original villain, China. In the end, the powers that be apparently decided to edit the film and change the invading force to North Korea in order to, as the LA Times put it, stay on China’s “good side” and maintain access to its “lucrative box office.”
Now, I can hear a good portion of you groan at the thought of
another remake. I’ve been known to do the same. Concerns about the surge in
remakes—as a sign of Hollywood’s dearth of creativity to its financial greed to
milk box office name recognition—have some merit. Indeed, in an economically
risky market remakes do seem to have a financial attraction. "When you're going to take a risky bet, you try to
look for any advantage -- real or imagined -- you can get," says
Variety’s Joe Leydon.
But are remakes in and of themselves really all bad?
Not everyone thinks so. Vic
Holtreman, who owns and runs ScreenRant.com, says remakes can
actually be good as long as they tend to meet certain criteria, like the
original film is “terribly dated in either setting or pacing and style” or it isn’t a
beloved classic (like Casablanca or Citizen Kane). And in “In Defense of
Movie Remakes” at Time, Jeff
Alexander writes:
The modern remake… tends to be less of a remake—with that word’s implication of a word-for-word, shot-for-shot repeat of the original—than an update, an artifact of today’s world, rather than some relic with the top layer of dust blown off. If remakes can be accomplished with insight and imagination, and I believe they can, there’s no reason they shouldn’t exist…. And after all, if a story is worth telling once, it’s worth telling again.
I resonate with this. When a film is updated and remade well,
the changes themselves can say something about the story we see ourselves
living in today. And like all good stories, how we tweak and change a familiar
or old story can point to something significant about ourselves and the world
around us.
The original Red Dawn
was written and shot in the bleak heart of the Cold War, something my
generation all but took for granted would not end well. (And I well remember
watching the events unfold that essentially ended that era and can still feel a
sense of surrealistic daze.) And while there are more than a few critics out
there who have suggested the original is a pro-war blood fest, after you watch
those kids shredded both inside and out, I don’t think it is the positive spin
they think it is. But watch the original and be your
own judge.
Alexander’s words also resonate when it comes to screenwriter
Carl Ellsworth, whose screenwriting credits include Red Eye, Disturba (a loose remake of Rear Window) and the remake of Last House on the Left . Early on in Red
Dawn’s production, Ellsworth touched on the power of retelling a story in our own time
and place in an interview at ShockTillYouDrop:
We're not straying too far from the original story. It's about the Wolverines, a group of kids. And we're doing our best to make these kids realistic and relatable. There are parallels between these kids who become an insurgency and the insurgencies we've had to face in Iraq. . . . I want to explore what could happen, let's talk to some experts and see if this could happen today. Oddly enough, the timing of the remake could really tap into something with what's happening with the world right now.
My husband and I hosted Ellsworth for a few days while he was
doing research in Washington, D.C., for Red
Dawn and this sounds exactly like him. He has a passion for telling stories that
resonate with us here and now. If the changes and tweaks he planned for this
story remain in the version we will see in November, they will indeed reveal
some interesting things about ourselves and our world today.
And that could bring God-talk into these open spaces.