Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.

Saw ‘Red Dawn’ the other day. I’ll put some spoiler cuttage in here for folks that havent seen it yet.

There are plenty of nods to the original movie and a ton of differences, not all of them good. Actually, not many of them are good at all.

The orginal Red Dawn wasn’t really what you’d call a great movie, or even a good movie. It was formulaic, jingoistic, predictable Reagan-era filmmaking….but so what? I thought it was fun.

Part of what made the movie unique, rather than just some behind-enemy-lines movies was that the main characters were, according to the story, ‘a buncha kids’. There was the whole juxtaposition of youthful innocence and exuberance being thrown into the cauldron of brutality that is war..especially guerrilla/partisan war. We saw the high school kids suddenly have to harden ad do terrible things like killing their own and sacrificing themselves.

The re-make of Red Dawn doesn’t really convey that. The characters are youthful, certainly, and there are passing nods to them being high-school age, but they take to their AK’s and RPG’s like ducks to water after Jed, the six-year Marine combat vet, gives the obligatory training montage. In the original Red Dawn the role of seen-it-all combat vet who trains them to be real soldiers was that of Tanner…the shot-down pilot. Here we traded Swayze’s Jed Eckert the football hero for Jed Eckert Marine bas-ass. I saw a movie where a former military bad-ass is suddenly thrust into a situation where he has to wage a private little war with the help of bystanders…it was called “Under Siege”.  Nowhere in this movie do you really see the emotional conflicts and the stark transformations from happy teenagers to feral partisans like you did in the original movie. So..that’s a big change.

Plenty of nods in the movie to the orignal, but some things were absent as well. The blood-drinking scene is played for laughs, but the ‘find all the Form 4473′ scene was absent. Robert never becomes the hate-fuelled killing machine he was in the first one. The execution of the homing-device-enabled Wolverine is changed to a willing self-sacrifice. Tanner lives, offering them a chance to leave for ‘Free America’. Jed Eckert dies and his brother carries on, recruiting new Wolverines to continue the war.

So, there’s enough material in there to qualify it as a remake but there’s some major changes in there as well. I suppose it could be compared to the ‘re-boot’ of Star Trek a couple years ago.

From a tactical standpoint, there were some interesting moments. Drop Jed Eckert into ‘The Walking Dead’ and Georgia would be zombie-free in about a week, I think. One very interesting and pleasurable bit of tactical thinking: after the group all wind up at the cabin, one kid gets his pistol taken by Jed after showing poor trigger discipline. The kid rails at Jed demanding to know who put him in charge. Jed knocks him down and tells him to shut up. Next morning, Jed wakes up his brother telling him the kid and his buddy took all the food and ran off. He then tells his brother to gather all the important gear and hide it in the woods in case the kid compromised their position. See, thats the kinda smart thinking thats missing from The Walking Dead.

I’m not going to go into partisan and guerrilla tactics as portrayed in the movie because, well, I’m not a partisan or a guerrilla. I’ve read about it bunches, have some opinions and ideas, but I’ve never spent a day in the military so I am about as unqualified as you can get. But, from an armchair quarterback position, I liked the planning and strategies used.

Acting? Well, reallly, it’s pretty one-dimensional stuff. Chris Hemsworth who plays Jed is going to be going places for his good looks, physique, and his huge exposure from ‘Thor’ and ‘The Avengers’. Tom Cruise’s son, Connor, played a role that could have been done by just about anyone. The female leads originally played by Jennifer Leigh and Leah Thompson were also pretty much interchangeable with any attractive female.

This movie won’t win any awards, and it’ll be subject to all sorts of interpretations, but from a ‘is it worth seeing’ standpoint I’d say a qualified yes. If you saw the original, and want to see how it might have been done with a bigger budget, you’d probably like this film. I saw it just for the sake of comparing it to the original and I liked the original more, warts and all. One thing that I really disliked was the ‘shakeycam’ footage that just makes the entire picture a jumbled blur. I understand a car chase and car wrecks are jarring experiences but jostling the camera around doesn’t give me a ‘you are there’ experience. It gives me a ‘what the hell is going on I cant see a thing’ experience.

Good movie for matinee, good for Netflix, and if I can find a bootleg version to keep on my computer I’ll do that.