Latino Review continues their excellent series of video script reviews with a look at the remake of Red Dawn. As you may remember, I got lots of info from screenwriter Carl Ellsworth about the redo, but one thing he wouldn’t share on the record was the identity of the invasion force. LR’s El Mayimbe has revealed what many of you guessed: it’s the Chinese (with some Russian help in act two. Ellsworth told me at the time that his research showed the Chinese couldn’t mount a US invasion on their own).
What’s sort of a bummer is that the things Ellsworth told me that got me most excited – that the idea of Americans who are fighting an insurgency in Iraq will become members of an insurgency at home would be explored – are apparently downplayed in the script El Mayimbe has. I’m hoping that he has a draft that’s a little out of date, because to me there’s zero reason to make this movie unless you have that as a central aspect. It’s THE moral question of the movie in the first decade of the 21st century.