Hacker Cinema
Red Dawn
2012 · Film · 93 min
Directed by Dan Bradley
A city in Washington state awakens to the surreal sight of foreign paratroopers dropping from the sky—shockingly, the U.S. has been invaded and their hometown is the initial target. Quickly and without warning, the citizens find themselves prisoners and their town under enemy occupation. Determined to fight back, a group of young patriots seek refuge in the surrounding woods, training and reorganizing themselves into a guerrilla group of fighters.
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26 comments on Hacker News
And then war came, the enemy somehow managed to attack the area where you live - think that silly Red Dawn movie - and enemy troops are closing in on your area. What do you do?
1: Give up and let them take you and yours
2: Fight them in the knowledge that you'll be shunned by society which took your own advice to heart
Nope, I suspect you'd board one of those army transports which have been sent to evacuate civilians to a safe area where they'll live until the military has successfully beaten the enemy combatants. Then you'll return to your house which seems to have survived unscathed, fire up your laptop and write another post on how it is best to avoid the people who just saved you and yours. Don't hire them, don't date them, they're broken and can't be fixed
Happy 4th of July btw.
In any other presidency, it would be Russia. We had a cold war with them for 40+ years with anticipations that a hot war could start at literally any moment (see the fictional film Red Dawn). But, I don't think that Trump would invade Russia. His priorities are vastly different from any other president, Democrat or Republican.
Because Best Korea is politically/diplomatically permissible. No one gives a shit if the North Korean government is painted as the bad guy (maybe not even the North Korean government!).
However, this is 110% the opposite for China and the Chinese government. They are not permissible as the bad guy. So much so that it scuttled a Hollywood reboot of an action movie a decade ago (Red Dawn). Hollywood is on a short leash, but don't be fooled into thinking the capitulation ends there. Even our own politicians know better. If one were generous (I'm not inclined towards generosity) one might wonder if the politicians know that our economy is hostage to the CCP and do not wish to see us harmed, but the more likely explanation is that there's soft corruption that persuades them to sell us down the river.
The Chinese have worked hard, tirelessly even, for more than half a century, to make it very difficult to say anything bad about them without repercussions, even in countries far outside China's obvious sphere of influence. North Korea needs to invest in global propaganda efforts if it wishes to get off the jerkwar list...
If we wanted to play by the same rules China plays by, yes.
You basically can't operate in China without somehow letting the CCP in on your affairs. A great example is the automotive industry: American car companies had to work with Chinese-based counterparts in joint ventures to have any operations in China prior to 2017. Microsoft had to let Chinese officials look over the Windows source code to get it approved for sale in PRC. Hollywood routinely modifies movie productions to appeal to Chinese censors and audiences, even at points in the production where the changes would impact the release outside of China (see the remake of Red Dawn). American companies do this because they fear losing access to the market; Chinese companies do not have to do the same for access to the American market.
Actually, communism controls our own movie industry. Take the famous case of the remake of Red Dawn where they changed the antagonist from China to North Korea. That was done at the TOP levels, communist pressure on Obama, who then exerted pressure on the studio. On behalf of Xi.
John Cena learning Chinese so he could apologize for supporting pro-democracy protests in Taiwan is another one. Our bland culture is partly designed by communism.
A lot of times, it's made with a "modern cast" because people think watching movies before they were born are unwatchable.
For example, WTF was up with the remake of Red Dawn using the totally unbelievable premise that the North Koreans were the invading force?!?! I mean, the crazy Nazis on the backside of the moon plot was more believable than that. It is unusual that I have seen a remake that made me think, "yup, that was totally worth it" and improved the story
Some movies were political but the politics were far less polarised within the "west" than they are now. Some movies - e.g. "Red Dawn" or "the Hunt for Red October" portrayed a clearly black-and-white division between the "good" west and the "bad" east with the dividing line being formed by the national borders. Outside of academia there was not much support for the "red" side so these movies did not create an internal division, you either liked them or you thought they were mostly over the top but otherwise harmless action flicks. Movies like "The Colour Purple" or "One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest" were critical of the US but this criticism did not cause division because nearly everyone agreed with it and the movies themselves did not portray the issues as "systemic faults with current society". The few die-hard bigots who might have railed against these movies were ignored as being relics of the past.
How different it is today with movies which are not much more than thinly disguised moral lessons where the audience is lectured on issued of race, gender, "climate", environment, migration and more. The issues - whether real or imagined - are being portrayed as "current", "systemic" and "catastrophic", the "good" vs. "bad" divider goes straight through society where the "good" side is characterised by being "norm-critical" and in opposition to mainstream culture. Those who do not follow are portrayed as "bad" and labelled with a number of -isms and -phobias. Where earlier movies mostly portrayed "the other" - the "reds", the "filthy rich", the "criminals" - as being bad current "political" movies portray "us" as being ignorant, oppressive, wasteful, conservative "white" or "white-adjacent" bumpkins who really need to "be educated".
We're not allowed to show China negatively in US movies. Checkout Red Dawn remake for context.
It's almost completely gone in the US on Netflix also. I've had better luck watching older movies on Youtube 'Free with Ads' service, especially 80s and 90s movies, than I've had on Netflix. And there's no ads if you get Youtube's premium service (I currently don't, but don't mind the ads).
Currently on there is Wrongfully Accused (funny Leslie Nielsen movie), Glengarry Glen Ross, Robocop (1987), Ghost in the Shell, The Mask, License to Drive, The Neverending Story, Tombstone, Leon The Professonal, The Amityville Horror, Over the Top (some Stallone movie), Miracle on 34th Street, Con Air, Edward Scissorhands, Gone Fishin', Look Who's Talking, While You Were Sleeping, The Craft, Red Dawn, So I Married an Axe Murderer, Secret of Nimh, Killer Klowns from Outer Space, Revenge of the Pink Panther, Mad Max, Das Boot, Little Shop of Horrors, Hackers, .... okay, I'm just going to stop now, but t keeps going, I'm only a third of the way though the list.
I've long thought Red Storm Rising could have made a really good miniseries. You're right the scope is too big for a singular movie but maybe just right for a 6-10 hour series. It won't happen now though given Russia's recent displays of competence. The premise will be considered too outlandish. It would end up as believable as the Red Dawn remake or the one where the North Koreans shoot up the White House.
But we didn’t blow ourselves back to the stone age in the 50s and 60s. This fate turned out to be not quite as inevitable as “A Canticle” would seem to suggest.
Yet evidence pointing to this outcome was all around us during the Cold War, right up to the late 1980s. Development of new and more potent weapons. Serious accidents or near accidents - one crazy one I remember hearing about was one side almost launching a retaliatory barrage when the radar gave a false positive for an incoming attack. Proxy wars. Opaque succession plans in the USSR, China, North Korea, and Cuba. Sabre-rattling and standoffs all over the world.
In elementary school in the 1970s we didn't have to do "Duck and Cover" but we did have drills involving classes marching in a line down to the basement which had signs marking it as a "Fallout Shelter." Sometimes I still see them. (History: https://www.wgbh.org/news/2018/01/23/local-news/what-do-those-fallout-shelter-signs-actually-mean)
When I got a little older, I can't tell you how unsettling it was to see serious looking people talking on the nightly news about some incident on the North Korean border, or a power struggle in Moscow after Brezhnev died, or how many thousands of ICBMs each side had pointing at each other. How fucked up is it that 15 year old me understood concepts like MIRV (https://armscontrolcenter.org/multiple-independently-targetable-reentry-vehicle-mirv/) or the U.S. maintaining a bunch of B-52s loaded with nukes in the air at all times?
The news we saw and read was reinforced through pop culture that drove home the idea that we would blow ourselves to bits. In high school in the mid-1980s we were assigned Canticle as well as Neville Shute's On The Beach, which follows a similarly depressing narrative (northern hemisphere covered by radiation, southern slowly dying off, what people do as the inevitable gets closer). Red Dawn. Firefox. Reruns of Dr. Strangelove. Or the TV series The Day After.
We couldn't believe it when crowds climbed on the Berlin Wall in November 1989. That's when people were able to rub their eyes and think just maybe we weren't going to kill ourselves.
>I can't even think of a major movie since 2010 that had a villain who was socialist besides The Interview, Team America, and Red Dawn 2012 but those aren't even fake examples.
>A wealthy capitalist in a suit is pretty much today's standard cliche villain trope.
This was true during the Cold War, too. In the Bond films, Soviet Russia is the enemy in exactly one film, For Your Eyes Only. Red China is the implied power behind the throne in two, Thunderball and You Only Live Twice. In every other entry in the series, the villains are SPECTRE and a variety of madmen, predominantly the billionaire type.
Another example is the frequently made claim that "Muslims are always the villains in Hollywood". It is far, far, far easier to name films in which "Islamophobia" is the greater evil than the opposite, both before and after the September 11 attacks on the US. The Sum of All Fears is one example in which the book's Islamic villains are explicitly replaced (by "neo-Nazis") for the film.
>> I’d bet the world has seen a >1000:1 ratio of scenes featuring evil capitalists to scenes featuring evil communists
> They'd bet. Ok?
The context was "in the past several decades", if this means 3, that goes to 1992. I'd say that's a very, very safe bet. I'd take it too. If it was to 1982 it would be less so but still safe.
Otherwise it's been a long time since the cold war. The 'Red Scare' even longer.
I can't even think of a major movie since 2010 that had a villain who was socialist besides The Interview, Team America, and Red Dawn 2012 but those aren't even fake examples.
Even in your "Dirty Communists" TVTropes links all the examples were Cold War era, the only two modern films I found were also using historical real references:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/TheDeathOfStalin
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/BridgeOfSpies
I could list a countless modern films/shows where the enemy was an evil billionaire entrepreneur or faceless corporation. A wealthy capitalist in a suit is pretty much today's standard cliche villain trope.
What I find most dangerous about the United States bending to the will of China via their corporations is that it's affecting our story telling. The stories we tell define how we remember history, who our heroes are and what we think is worth fighting for. In 2012 the script of Red Dawn (a remake) was changed so that it was the North Koreans invading the US rather than the Chinese. This was done to avoid provoking the ire of the Chinese market, a critically important market for our film industry, much like it's a critically important market for Intel. This trend has continued and worsened.
You'll notice there are no courageous well known film makers tackling the humanitarian abuses in China. It's a career killer.
And yet the most popular film in China in 2021 is The Battle at Lake Changjin which depicts the Chinese fighting American soldiers and winning. It's also the highest grossing film in Chinese history and the second highest grossing film world-wide in 2021. It's also the highest grossing non-english film of 2021.
America has lost the narrative and the Chinese have gained it without question. Our free market economy and desire for continued access to the Chinese market is destroying our freedom of expression and has left what used to be a community of courageous filmmakers shining light in important issues cowering in a corner.
Shit, China influences US film too. Many films avoid showing LGBTQ main characters or China in a bad light so they can sell into the Chinese market. A good example is the recent remake of Red Dawn. It was supposed to have the Chinese as bad guys but instead they used the extremely implausible North Koreans as antagonists.
Red Dawn (2012) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1234719/
This is a tangent, but the "Red Dawn" example is kind of amusing to me because in 2009, a China-is-the-new-Cold-War-Russia film seems patently offensive to Chinese and Chinese-Americans, even without Chinese government political pressure. That the filmmakers belatedly switched the villains to North Korea is kind of offensive to me as an Asian, since it seems to reveal a thought process of "let's just make any Asians the villains".
In 1984, Russia as the villains makes sense since we were several decades into the Cold War at that point. Putting aside the fact that they are hugely valuable trade allies, we have never been at war with China, or (at least in 2009) been involved in any kind of proxy conflict along the scale of Afghanistan and Vietnam. Making China the new Russia is as off-putting as making Mexico the villains of a "Red Dawn" remake.
If the rationale is: "Well, only China makes sense because they're the only rival superpower left". That still leaves unanswered the obvious question of: why do we need this kind of military occupation fantasy at all? Or, if realism truly is a concern, and the filmmaker's artistic passion for the military occupation genre, then why not remake it with the U.S. as the invading superpower, and the hero resistance being, well, just about any other country (doesn't even have to be Middle Eastern)?
The cynical answer to the latter question, of course, is that such a movie would be so denounced by American public figures (political and non-political) that the studio/fillmaker would be effectively blacklisted from mainstream U.S. business. Much like releasing a "China is the Bad Others!" film would be if you wanted mainstream Chinese patronage.
Nothing wrong with that. You might laugh at skeletons being where they choose to draw the line, but we have rules as well about what can happen in a video game. There are no kids in Grand Theft Auto for a reason.
Also, Blizzard only removed them from the game in china
What would be more disturbing is if they had to rewrite some orc-politics story so it wouldn't offend chinese sensibilities, and US consumers got the rewritten version as well.
The movie Red Dawn(2012) was a remake of a 1984 action film where a communist army invades the US. They updated the invader from the USSR to China, come to "repossess" the US after we defaulted on national debt. This offended the chinese, so the producers had to spend $1M editing every reference to china in the film and making it a North Korean invasion instead. This was the version US consumers were sold.
You have movies where the country of the 'bad guys' was changed in post-production to North Korea to appease China: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Dawn_(2012_film)
I'd be more concerned about Chinese financing of Hollywood. Nearly every big-budget production these days has Chinese co-producers. This leads to farcical episodes like the remake of Red Dawn featuring feeble North Korea as the villain rather than China as originally envisioned.
The one that really sticks out is the recent Red Dawn remake. I mean, really, North Korea is going to invade the pacific coast? It was clearly written about Communist China, that's the only way the movie could have made the slightest bit of sense, but they kowtowed and turned it into a dumpster fire, and they still didn't procure release rights there.
Or North Korea - the idea that it could really threaten the US (like in the reboot of Red Dawn, a terrible film, stick to the original) is ludicrous.
Tiajuana, Mexico? Siberia? Sounds like the makings for a 'Red Dawn 2: Putin and El Chapo" where Trump is holed up with the NRA as patriotic rebels protecting Hillary, the POTUS ;)
The 2012 film remake of Red Dawn made China the bad guys compared with 1984 original Red Dawn where Russia and Cuba were the bad guys.
But seriously, could this be used to launder money, or the scam wouldn't allow for it based upon the setup of the short squeeze? Could money be put in the system this way and cleaned and turn a profit at the same time?
China is already a huge factor in film - remember that awful Red Dawn remake where the North Koreans were inexplicably invading the West Coast? The original script had the antagonists being the ChiComs, which makes more sense (at least as much as the original did...). The studio decided that wouldn't play in Peking[1], and those sweet, sweet international box office dollars won out.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_it_play_in_Peoria%3F
They re-made Red Dawn, didn't they?
The film and television industry is in the business of suspending disbelief. And they are no more immune to believing their own BS than any other industry.
I have no trouble believing that studios and theater chains think themselves to be so important that nations would go to war over them. As a whole, they are the least closely connected to reality of any business sector that I know about.
If Best Korea didn't retaliate over Team America: World Police, I think The Interview is probably safe.
I think we need to mention the sins of Mao quite a bit more before we're in danger of Godwining.
You know some history. Most people who are reading that Atlantic article don't have this context at all. This is because people get their history from movies, and Hollywood chooses to make movies like the Karate Kid remake (about anti-black racism in China) or this Red Dawn farce rather than movies about the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, about the consequences of being "idealistic" and "ideological".
"Ideological" is bad. It's not good. It led to a lot of people dying. And the support for "oppressed peoples" that the OP thinks so much of is intimately tied to the rhetoric of communism, which is invariably and horrifically belied by the reality. To repeat said rhetoric uncritically is to bury those people again. Their deaths were denied in speeches at the time and they are glossed over in writing today. This is wrong. We need to remember them.
So yeah, unfortunately I don't think you can hold up the Maoist era as comparatively positive in any substantive regard without acknowledging that said act is morally equivalent to "Mussolini/Hitler made the trains run on time."
And the thing is - Mao didn't even make the trains run on time. He destroyed China to such an extent that people were forced to eat each other's children to survive.
http://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/05/books/horror-of-a-hidden-chinese-famine.html
For the party newspaper to tell people that it was good for them to eat less at a time when it was also spinning fantasies about the bounty being engendered by the Great Leap was a relatively small, if telling, irony. At the larger, horrific center of Mr. Becker's account is the widespread resort among the Chinese people to that most sickening form of desperation: cannibalism, the selling of human flesh on the market, the swapping of children so people could use them for food without committing the additional sin of eating their own.
It has of course been known for many years that the Great Leap produced a terrible calamity in China lasting from roughly 1959 to 1962. But Mr. Becker, who is the Beijing bureau chief of The South China Morning Post, has written the most compelling and complete account of that calamity, describing it systematically as it affected the countryside, the cities and the immense network of camps for ''rightists'' and other political prisoners that China maintained at the time.
I would argue that these kinds of things are much more important in forming a picture of Mao's China than whether he once gave lip service to MLK. If 99% of people who came to that page already knew the term "laogai", fine, one could arguably move on to a second topic. But we're a long ways away from successfully communicating these high order bits.