Red Dawn (2012)

The 2012 iteration of Red Dawn arrives with the weary inevitability of a remake nobody requested and, judging by the receipts, nobody much wanted. A North Korean paratrooper invasion of Spokane is met by a band of teenagers who retreat to a cabin, name themselves after their school mascot, and wage guerrilla war from an abandoned mine. The premise carries a faint whiff of economic anxiety, a financial crisis abroad and foreign repossession of American assets, but the film has no interest in pursuing that thread. It wants to shoot things. It shoots them capably enough, in a semi-documentary register that a veteran stunt coordinator can manage, and then it stops.

The cultural ledger here is thin. A handful of non-white performers appear in supporting roles and are treated as ordinary members of the ensemble, which is to say they are not treated at all. Two young women are present, one learns to fight, and the film remains a story about brothers and their brothers in arms. There is no romantic or political interest in the women beyond their utility to the plot. Matters of sexuality, environment, bodily self-regard, and neurological difference do not surface. The antagonists were Chinese until a studio decided the Chinese box office mattered more, at which point they became North Korean by digital edit. That is commerce, not conscience.

What remains is propaganda of the in-universe variety: banners and pamphlets as set dressing, slogans about rebuilding reputations and repairing economies, none of it aimed at the audience as instruction. The film is jingoistic, loud, and ideologically incurious. It does not lecture, because it has nothing to say. It simply wants the Wolverines to win, and it is not fussy about why.