Remake of Red Dawn breeds hatred

If Hollywood action movies are meant to entertain, the remake of the 1984 movie Red Dawn, which hit cinemas across the United States last week, is a huge disappointment in every way.

Compared to many Hollywood blockbusters, Red Dawn, produced with a $65 million budget, looks cheaply made. The mundane plot, poor acting and low technology of the movie simply mean it is a waste of time and money for viewers.

No wonder Rotten Tomatoes, a film review aggregator, gave Red Dawn only 11 percent in approval ratings based on 99 reviews, among the lowest for recently released movies.

But that is not really my point.

The movie is unentertaining because of the premise: troops from the DPRK are invading Spokan in the northwest US state of Washington. After a mysterious power outage strikes the city one night, the locals wake up the next morning to find DPRK paratroopers landing on their streets, tanks rolling. Several local high school graduates lead a resistance movement against the invaders.

As a Chinese viewer, I didn't feel any sense of relief because the invading army was from the DPRK instead of the originally planned Chinese. Distrust and misunderstanding between the US and North Korea are much worse than the mistrust between the US and China.

Such a movie undermines the hard work of so many people trying to build bridges and boost mutual understanding between these nations and peoples. In China's case, it is the Chinese students studying in the US, the US students studying in China, the US government plans to send 100,000 US students to China; the Confucius Institutes that help people in the US learn Mandarin and understand Chinese culture, and non-governmental organizations such as the National Committee on United States-China Relations that has devoted decades of hard work to facilitate understanding between the two peoples.

Such a movie bodes ill for regional and world peace and therefore should not be taken lightly.

I still remember in early 2010, a few months after my arrival in New York, a group of Chinese, known as the Anti-Red Dawn League, protested vehemently against MGM's plan to remake Red Dawn, which would feature a fictional invasion of the US by the People's Liberation Army. The public outcry forced MGM to have second thoughts, for fear of losing the lucrative Chinese market, estimated at $2.1 billion in 2011 and growing fast.

You may claim Chinese people lack a sense of humor. Yet if you study modern Chinese history, it is not hard to figure out why Chinese people are sensitive about foreign invasion, humiliation and demonization.

This is probably why China has not yet made a movie like Independence Day, or Japan Sinks. Hollywood, on the other hand, has produced numerous movies wiping out New York City by tornado, flood, a snow storm or aliens. Would it be less offensive if the invading troops were Canadian, the US' friendly neighbors to the north? The Canadians probably wouldn't be happy either.

What is also troubling is that Red Dawn was clearly remade with the aim of arousing patriotism among Americans. Just listen to the main character: "For them, this is just some place; for us, this is home. We inherited our freedom, now it's up to all of us to fight for it."

These are merely Cold War slogans. The original Red Dawn, made in 1984 during the Cold War, told a similar story about a small town in Colorado being invaded by Soviet and Cuban armies.

Movies like Red Dawn, which breed enmity among peoples, should never be made in the first place, let alone remade.

The author, based in New York, is deputy editor of China Daily USA. E-mail: chenweihua@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 11/30/2012 page8)