Red Dawn Remake

The original Red Dawn, starring Patrick Swayze, came out in 1984.  Ill omened year that.  It was gripping, and carried a strong message of patriotism and American exceptionalism.  In fact so strong that my lefty Protestant minister preached a sermon against the movie one Sunday in 1984.  I'm assuming everybody saw it back in the '80s, or later on TV.  The actors, unknowns except for Patrick Swaze, did good, camera work and sound was good. 
  So, 20 years later, Hollywood does a remake.  Remakes are easy.  It's easy to get funding, and easy to do the screenplay and do the plot.  And so, just to check up on 'em, I netflixed it last night. 
   Big mistake.  It was a terrible remake.  Camerawork sucked.  Interior shots were so dark you couldn't recognize the characters.  Few of the grand panorama shots of western mountain scenery.  John Ford made his rep with movies set in super scenic Monument Valley.  None of that kind of camerawork in remade Red Dawn.
  Actors mumbled their lines.  At least the sound man didn't let the score override the dialog. The dialog omitted character names, every one wore pretty much the same costumes (urban grunge mixed with combat fatigues)  making it hard to tell one character from the other.  The relationship between brothers Jed and Matt was confused.  In the original, Jed and Matt were quite close, in the last scene we see Jed carrying a wounded Matt in his arms off an urban battlefield, thru a heavy snowstorm, back into the hills.  In the remake, Matt is not much of a team player and Jed does a lot of snarling at Matt about it. In the original the characters make it clear that this guerrilla warfare thing is scary, as well as cold, lonely and hungry.  Very little of that in the remake. 
   Props were disappointing.  The enemy shows up driving Humvees, whereas we expect the enemy to drive enemy manufactured vehicles.  No horses, everyone gets round in cars and pickup trucks.  No sign of the big ivory handled six gun that Jed used to shoot down the nasty enemy colonel in the original.  The Wolverines fight with popgun assault rifles, no 12 gauge pump shotguns, no Model 70 scoped rifles, just full automatic popguns.  No scary enemy helicopters either.    
   Era is sort of blurry.  We see Obama and Hillary Clinton on TV in some of the opening atmospheric shots, that makes it after 2008.  Then we see the Wolverines escaping an enemy ambush in a Detroit station wagon.  I haven't seen a station wagon on the road for 15-20 years.  Every drives SUV's now. 
   The cast all seemed too old to be in high school.  In the original, everyone looked like real high schoolers, in the remake. everyone looked old enough to have graduated college.   
  Anyhow, Hollywood has lost it's touch.  They can't even do a decent remake.