“We’re under attack! We have to hide!”
“Who’s attacking us?”
“I don’t know, it’s an Asian gang or something! I saw someone, he looked Asian! They were speaking another language! I’m pretty sure it was … Asian!”
So, producers of a remake of Red Dawn, a 1984 movie in which a bunch of American teenagers take refuge in the woods to escape Russian invaders, have changed the invaders from Chinese to North Korean. After they completed filming. In 2009. Good job, guys. I’m sure no one will be the least bit uncomfortable about this.
Red Dawn has been having problems from the get-go, it seems, and this looks like another notch in its troubled belt. First, it was delayed due to financial problems at MGM. Then, when China caught wind of it, they were not exactly thrilled to be portrayed as evil invading terrorists and an uproar ensued, leaving possible international distributors unwilling to take on a lightning rod for controversy. So, to please the distributors, the producers decided to change the race of the foreign soldiers, thinking that no one could tell the difference between Chinese people and North Korean people.
Wow, really? No one thought China might be upset about this during the script phase? And now that the entire movie has been shot, you’ll spring for redoing the opening sequence, “re-editing two scenes and using digital technology to transform many Chinese symbols to Korean?” But producers, listen: if you realize the need to make those not-so-minor changes, maybe you can see that in order to not appear completely racist, you might want to reshoot all the scenes with Chinese people and replace them with Koreans … No? Just the flags? … Really?
Oh, right. American audiences have no idea how to distinguish between Chinese people and North Korean people.
If Red Dawn is unable to find a distributor, then it will a straight-to-video release. News of the Future: The Red Dawn remake will be a straight-to-video release.
