However, it’s Michigan posing as Eastern Washington–Spokane to be exact. Anybody who has any knowledge about the geography of both areas is going to have a good laugh at the remake.
Incidentally, they initially did scout Spokane as a shooting location for the Red Dawn remake. However, for some reason, they opted to shoot around Pontiac, Michigan instead. I guess Spokane didn’t look run-down and economically depressed enough for them. Unfortunately, that means the mass of filmgoers who see this unnecessary remake of a cheesy piece of 80s Cold War paranoia are going leave the theater thinking Pontiac is Spokane. I don’t know whether to feel relieved, insulted, or both.
Actually, the film mentions (when they pick up that downed F-15 pilot) that the Russians initially used tactical nukes on American missile silo sites and several cities (Washington D.C. and a few others, I believe) before they invaded.
…I watched about half of the film last week on TV.
If the Wolverines are anything like the original ones, they’re going to be using guerilla tactics against the Chinese. Ambushes, IEDs etc. That means the heroes of this movie are going to fighting the same way our real-life enemies are fighting us. In fact, the Wolverines were largely based on the Afghan mujahideen who were fighting Soviet occupation and are now fighting us.
I don’t think it will be successful. I’m 33, and I just barely remember the Cold War, and people my age and a bit older still don’t understand why Russia was ever seen as a real threat, because for most of our lives Russia has been a decaying superpower. Go ahead, talk to someone in their early to mid thirties and see how real the looming spector of the cold war was to them. It just wasn’t the same for us born after the Vietnam war.
So how the hell do they plan to sell this concepts to people who don’t even have that much of an idea of what it’s like to fear invasion from another country? They may as well remake it with aliens as the bad guy for all the relevance it’ll have to anyone under the age of 30: you know, the prime movie-going public.
Well, I’m 38 and I still remember my grade school had a fallout shelter. We would have nuclear bomb drills where we would hide under our desks or go to the shelter. So the cold war seemed very real to me.
Sorry but I don’t get comments like this. Since when is logic needed for movies? Batman, Matrix, Escape fron NY, etc. I’d give it a try if they release it, I liked the original.
It didn’t have any cheesy parts: it was pure CheezWhiz. Good for a laugh, a tub of popcorn and a look at Swayze, but no real dairy was involved in its making.
Which is why I said early to mid-thirties, not late 30s. You’re probably one of the youngest people who is old enough to really remember the Cold War the way our parents talked about it.
I had a tacky thought for a permise for this movie which at the hands of a skillfull satirist could be extremely funny. Remember the scene in the original Red Dawn where the old man is hiding his granddaughters in the basement so the Soviet troops won’t rape them? Have the Chinese raiding for women. The war could spark when they try to get back some of the thousands of abandoned female “orphans” taken to the United States. With a lot of work this could be hysterical and every redneck’s new nightmare.
RD was one of those movies whose premise was so stupid that the film itself was a self-parody. The really funny thing was, the Cuban troops got transported thousands of miles into US territory, and had all kinds of stuff. The cheesy dialogue also contributed to the absurdity-I was laughing my head off halfway through.