Movie Review: Red Dawn

Entertaining remake improves on original.

Today is the 71st anniversary of Pearl Harbor, so it seemed appropriate to review a movie about another surprise attack on the United States.

Red Dawn is, of course, a remake of the 1984 movie about Soviet forces invading America and occupying large parts of the country. The story of a gang of teenagers taking to the hills and fighting back captured the patriotism and unapologetic anti-communism of the Reagan era.

Fast forward to 2012, when Occupiers wear Che Guevara t-shirts and the nation has just re-elected a president who, if not a communist himself, had communists as the major influences in his life. To release a remake of Red Dawn in this environment is box office roulette. The mainstream media has been predictably harsh. In what’s getting to be a habit, Roger Ebert prostituted his artistic judgment to his political views. His review followed the same technique as his rant against last year's Atlas Shrugged, Part I: he savaged the movie on narrow technical grounds that don’t make sense if you actually watch the thing. Overall, review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes gave Red Dawn ‘12 an 11% rating, compared to 53% for Red Dawn ‘84.

This is too bad, because Red Dawn is the rare remake that's actually better than the original.

The small budget feel of the 1984 film, combined with the cast of peripheral Brat Packers (including Lea Thompson, Jennifer Grey, and Charlie Sheen) made it seem like a John Hughes coming-of-age comedy about a camping trip instead of the war epic it was supposed to be. There were two scenes that I especially didn’t like. In the first, one gang member, Robert (C. Thomas Howell), having shot his first deer, must drink its blood by way of initiation. In the second, the gang discovers that the enemy has implanted a tracking device in the mayor's son, Daryl (Darren Dalton). I thought both of these scenes should have played out differently. More seriously, the script was flawed dramatically: in a consequence-free plot, the small band of pubescent partisans had almost nothing to do with the larger war of resistance raging in the America beyond the kids' campsite.

In contrast, a plot-line in the 2012 version about capturing a critical piece of enemy technology put the kids in the game. The enemy this time was North Korea instead of Russia, and the movie captured the harsh reality of occupation. Improved battle choreography, better special effects, and more scenes of urban fighting added realism and grit. The cast delivered some intense performances. In particular, Thor’s Chris Hemsworth was thoroughly convincing as Jed Eckert, the combat-tested marine on leave. I wasn’t thinking Marvel Comics at all. Kudos also go to Adrianne Palicki for screen presence. The woman is hot and she knows it.

Oh, and those two scenes I didn't like in the original: they’ve been rewritten.

The one disappointment was the leader of the occupation, Captain Cho (Will Yun Lee). His 1984 counterpart, Colonel Bella (Ron O’Neal) was one of the most vivid characters in the film, and one of the few who showed real character development. 2012’s Captain Cho, by contrast, was a cardboard villain.

Still, the existence of villains is one thing that hasn’t changed since the 80’s. It’s still a dangerous world, and sometimes it’s necessary for men and woman with guns to stop the bad guys. Red Dawn is an entertaining reminder.

Michael Isenberg is the author of Full Asylum, a novel about resistance, freedom, and hospital gowns. Check it out on Amazon.com.

Movie Review: Atlas Shrugged Part II

Photo source: atlasshruggedmovie.com

I almost didn’t write this. For the first 80 minutes of Atlas Shrugged Part II, I didn’t think I could write a good review and I didn’t want to write a bad one. Ayn Rand’s dystopian epic about a collapsing economy and Americans giving up in despair has long been one of my favorite books. I had written a great review of Part I, but the first two-thirds of this new movie were disappointing. The problem was directing. Although he had an experienced and talented cast, director John Putch just couldn't seem to get good performances out of them.

Samantha Mathis, as railroad executive Dagny Taggart, couldn’t deliver a line naturally to save her life. Mostly she moped around like a wet washcloth. Jason Beghe as steel magnate Hank Rearden sounded like he escaped from the cast of The Godfather, and Esai Morales made for a rather subdued Francisco d’Anconia. The speeches were flat and disconnected from the scenes around them.

Then came Directive 10-289. The government sought to prevent the economic emergency from getting worse by outlawing change. Businesses were prohibited from raising or lowering their output. Employees were prohibited from leaving their jobs. In other words, they were slaves. New Yorkers halted in the street to watch identical images of the president announce the new law, Big Brother-like, from every giant screen in Times Square. Suddenly, Atlas Shrugged Part II had become drama.

The rest of the movie was exciting and fast-paced. Rex Linn gave the best performance of the film as Kip Chalmers, a politician on his way to a fundraiser. He seemed to channel Fred Thompson as he bullied Dagny’s brother James to provide a new locomotive when the one pulling his train broke down. An older, and possibly unsafe coal-burner was found and in a gripping scene, the train got stuck inside a smoke-filled tunnel—with an army munitions train hurtling towards it in the other direction.

And then we even got to see Dagny become forceful. I wanted to cheer when she finally stood up to smarmy bureaucrat Wesley Mouch.

I didn’t completely hate the early parts. There were touches here and there that I enjoyed, many of them provided by the minor characters. Diedrich Bader was very likable as Quentin Daniels, as was, surprisingly, Bug Hall as the Wet Nurse. Star Trek Voyager’s Robert Picardo played Dr. Stadler the way I always imagined him. The production values were better than in Part I: views through the windows made the offices of New York City seem less like movie sets and more like, well, the offices of New York City. There was a great discussion about Rearden Steel on a news show, with Sean Hannity and Juan Williams as panelists. Mr Hannity defended Rearden, of course. And we got to hear the music of Richard Halley. Although his Fourth Concerto had, in the movie, become a rhapsody, the piece was true to the description in the book: “The notes flowed up, they spoke of rising, and they were the rising itself….[Dagny] listened to the symphony, thinking: This is why the wheels have to be kept going.” These bright spots kept me going until the movie got to the good stuff—which really was worth seeing.

Michael Isenberg is the author of Full Asylum, a dystopian comedy about a collapsing economy and Americans fighting back. Check it out on Amazon.com.

Ayn Rand answers Barack Obama – again

It’s been 55 years since Ayn Rand published Atlas Shrugged – and yet the 1957 epic seems to have anticipated every argument that Barack Obama is using in the presidential campaign of 2012. Which just goes to show how stale his arguments are.

Photo sources: Wikipedia, White House

Rand’s answer to “You didn’t build that” has already been making the rounds of the Internet. Now the president has brought Robin Hood into the debate, accusing “Romney Hood” of reversing the usual formula by stealing from the poor and giving to the rich. There was a character in Atlas Shrugged who did exactly that. The pirate Ragnar Danneskjöld become the terror of the seas by capturing government aid ships. Here’s what Danneskjöld had to say about Robin Hood in a conversation with steel magnate Hank Rearden:

“I’m after a man whom I want to destroy. He died many centuries ago, but until the last trace of him is wiped out of men’s minds, we will not have a decent world to live in.”         “What man?”         “Robin Hood.”         Rearden looked at him blankly, not understanding.         “He was the man who robbed the rich and gave to the poor. Well, I’m the man who robs the poor and gives to the rich—or, to be exact, the man who robs the thieving poor and gives back to the productive rich.”         “What in blazes do you mean?…”         “It is said that [Robin Hood] fought against the looting rulers and returned the loot to those who had been robbed, but that is not the meaning of the legend which has survived. He is remembered, not as a champion of property, but as a champion of need, not as a defender of the robbed, but as a provider of the poor. He is held to be the first man who assumed a halo of virtue by practicing charity with wealth which he did not own, by giving away goods which he had not produced, by making others pay for the luxury of his pity. He is the man who became the symbol of the idea that need, not achievement, is the source of rights, that we don’t have to produce, only to want, that the earned does not belong to us, but the unearned does. He became a justification for every mediocrity who, unable to make his own living, has demanded the power to dispose of the property of his betters.”

A “mediocrity who, unable to make his own living, has demanded the power to dispose of the property of his betters?” And to think Rand never even met Obama.

Michael Isenberg is the author of Full Asylum, a novel about politics, freedom, and hospital gowns. Check it out on Amazon.com.