When MGM decided to reboot ‘Red Dawn’ decades after the Cold War, the most obvious Communist aggressor was China. That proved to be a costly miscalculation.
In 2008, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc. desperately needed something familiar. The studio was fending off bankruptcy, so executives scoured the studio’s library of old movies to see what could be remade. Soon a contender emerged: “Red Dawn.”
The 1984 hit film starred Charlie Sheen and Patrick Swayze as teenage football players whose hometown is invaded by Communist forces from the Soviet Union. The high-school students grab hunting rifles and fashion homemade bombs. The Cold War had cast Soviets as the evil-empire threat to the U.S. Across the multiplex around the same time, Rocky boxed a Soviet fighter named Ivan Drago and John Rambo mowed down Communist soldiers.