But the Red Dawn remake cannot escape the implausibility of a young cast. Chris Hemsworth (a.k.a. Thor) is Jed, the leader of the "Wolverines," and Nickelodeon mainstay Josh Peck plays his younger brother Matt. Even so, though, if Bradley is smart he'll give them more interesting things to do than Milius gave to Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen, respectively. In the original Red Dawn, the Wolverines' strategy was simple: Shoot, shoot some more, and if that didn't work, use a rocket-powered grenade. Milius never offered his guerrillas a specific objective. They battled the Reds out of blind hatred, seemingly without a goal of victory.

There is so much gunfire in Red Dawn, in fact, that it once held the Guinness World Record for the most-violent movie ever made (according to The National Coalition on Television Violence, there were 134 acts of violence per hour, or 2.23 per minute). Left-leaning critics took issue with the excessive gunfire in part because of Milius's political leanings. "[A] former NRA board member, Milius is a military zealot, infatuated with the warrior code," writes David Plotz in Slate. "Red Dawn is really a fetish movie, an ode to guns and blood." Hopefully, in the remake, the Wolverines will at least indulge that fetish with greater purpose.

Whenever his characters were not firing their weapons, Milius showed the green teenagers transitioning into hardened warriors. But his attempt at character development was half-hearted at best. Implacable hatred drove the Wolverines, and their fervor got to the point where they abandoned strategy. In an unintentionally funny death scene, C. Thomas Howell screams "Wolverines!" before losing a doomed battle with a helicopter. While preserving the domestic framework, Bradley should eschew this foolhardy martyrdom take his inspiration from foreign invasion thrillers.

The aforementioned Army of Shadow gets existential about the toll of sacrifice. Director Jean-Pierre Melville, who was part of the French Resistance, stripped the characters of heroics and gave them steely determination instead. Ken Loach's The Wind That Shakes the Barley took a closer look at the emotional toll of guerilla fighting. Irish farmers approached warfare reluctantly and with ideology; unlike Red Dawn, in-fighting was about more than cowardice. They battled with conscience, even if it meant pitting brother against brother. There is simply no way Jed and Matt will reach such an impasse—the Red Dawn remake is a red-blooded action flick before anything else—but the only way to improve Red Dawn is to draw from films that handled the material with gravity and smarts.

Upon first glance, the biggest challenge facing a Red Dawn remake is finding an appropriate enemy. With a corny synthesizer score and the threat of the Soviets, the original certainly seems like a product of its time. But Red Dawn was more about jingoistic patriotism than it was about the Cold War. The Wolverine hatred of an "other," not the Reds specifically, is what drives the original Red Dawn. It could be about space aliens as long as a group of young, good-looking kids take to the hills in a mythical Real America. It's no surprise, therefore, that the remake easily switched its enemy from China to North Korea during post-production (at least they moved the action from Colorado to Washington State, a place where an enemy could conceivably invade). In the Red Dawn trailer, Jed energizes the Wolverines with, "For them, this is just some place. For us, it is home." The stream of pronouns preserves Milius's propaganda, but Bradley will hopefully split from the original when it's time to show how, precisely, the Wolverines avenge America.

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