About a million dollars in special effects will give another ethnic shift to the remake of Red Dawn as its Chinese villains (Soviets in the original) are being replaced with North Koreans instead.
Based on the 1984 John Milius cult classic, the story follows a group of teenagers who band together to fight back when their home town is invaded by foreign soldiers. In the original they were Soviets, in the remake the hostile force is a coalition dominated by the Chinese.
Now, to keep friendly with the rising superpower and its lucrative box office for American movies, the bad guys will be changed to North Koreans whose military isolationism means American media corporations have no potential revenue at stake.
The changes will cost less than $1 million. That includes digitally erasing Chinese flags and military symbols in two key scenes, substituting dialogue, and altering the opening sequence which sets up the story’s fictional backdrop.
This makes perfect marketing sense. In the era the original aired, it was The Cold War and we were spoon fed doses of propoganda hate against those damned commies.
It was easy to see the Soviets like “the enemy” when the film came out, but now it would be hard to relate to Chinese as “the enemy” especially when they hope to market the film there.
So they picked an “enemy” that is not a threat to their distribution market, which is politically believable as a military presence.
Of course since the actors are already playing the parts, it is likely that purists will complain that they are not Korean actors and their dialogue is likely changed making their lips move like a dubbed classic KungFu flick.
