Some years ago I was super involved in the video game world, I remember downloading everything that came out and I spent locked playing until finishing the game, well at that time one of my favorite games was Homefront. The game had graphics and an exquisite action story that made me addicted to it in a short time, the fact that it was super difficult to play also gave it a plus. Finally to what interests us, recently I found a movie that reminded me a lot of that game because basically have the same story, I do not know who copied who but in the same way that I liked the game I also liked the movie or at least most of it.

Red Dawn is a film of very conventional action but whose history of invasion makes it stand out a little, especially because here we do not have massive war confrontations, in this film all the action takes place in a small town and with a small youth guerrilla defending what remains of freedom.

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Going deeper into story.

As I mentioned at the beginning, this movie reminded me a lot of a video game called homefront, and is that basically share part of the same story or rather focus on the same spark. A small town is threatened when inexplicably (really inexplicably) a North Korean invasion begins to occur in their town, quickly hundreds of North Korean soldiers take control of the town, capturing and intimidating the most influential people and kidnapping anyone who might stand in their way, fortunately a brother duo and other young people avoid being captured and take refuge in a hidden cabin in the forest where they are quickly joined by other young people who also escape the invaders. That is basically the story, logically from this invasion unleashes a large number of dramas where each young person wants to flee or rescue their families but are held back by fear and lack of resources.

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The story is quickly unleashed and transformed into a struggle of sides when the young people who escaped at first begins to make small reconnaissance missions and coordinated attacks to try to steal supplies and collect some kind of information to help them better understand what is happening with their people and especially what this is all about the North Korean invasion. Yes, the young people form a subversive guerrilla that takes charge of destabilizing the invaders little by little through attacks to military installations; and it is great how little by little this group of young people becomes heroes for the people who are still in the town, since they see them as the only ones capable of helping, because yes, the American government for some reason does not intervene and in fact ends up looking for these young people and their improvised guerrilla to ask them for support.

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The action of the film is very good because it is not very big, the scenes are coordinated and developed to complement each other in a great way, so that they stand out for the technical details so well taken care of. After all, these young people are not military experts capable of making big bombs, they do what they can and they do it in a very good way.

The guerrilla-style plot is very good, because the scriptwriters really manage to convey that sense of mystery and suspense for not knowing what is going to happen, however the plot decays in quality because in the middle the creators decided to set up different love plots and unnecessary rescue subplots where they only let us see how characters we were beginning to care about are killed.

The Wolverines

In the characters fall the weak points of the plot because we never really get to know them, we only see and know what the characters are now, virtually none has a background story that makes us connect with them and their struggle, none manages to show an emotion that allows us to love them. We regret some deaths just because they die and that generates some feeling, but we don't really miss them because the characters are made only to fulfill a function in the guerrilla.

Basically we see how the story develops and decays but on the other hand the characters only advance in a straight sense no one evolves more than learning to shoot better, that's all their evolution. No character really becomes the protagonist, yes, we have someone who assumes the leadership but only because he is the most experienced of all the young people and therefore the others follow him, but nothing really make him the leader.

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Chris Hemsworth does an "acceptable" role, not badly but neither great, the only moment where we are thrilled with him is when he dies, and that's because his death causes an emotional blow in the group, after all he was the leader of the Wolverines. I was very pleased to see Josh Peck because after his success in youth series I had hardly seen him in more adult projects, his character is one of the few that gives something more than flat feelings, unfortunately they gave him a horrible subplot where he causes a lot of problems to the group and that diminishes its importance. Maybe if the characters had been polished more the film would have been better received by viewers.

Final Thoughts

Generally speaking, this is not a bad film at all, and it is obviously not a masterpiece either. The film is entertaining, has good action scenes and above all a plot that was very good on top, but that apparently wasn't entirely well done or that the creator don't knew how to develop at all because after a great first half the film falls and becomes more tedious when we do not see any progress in the story, the film enters a kind of loop where it seems that the scenes are repeated, something like if the creators had been left without ideas.

Entertaining film with good photography and good action scenes that go very much in line with the general tone of a film about a home guerrilla.

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