You do realize Red Dawn was released in 1984 while John Marsden's book Tomorrow When The War Began was first published in 1993? It looks like Marsden took the Red Dawn movie and adapted the story for his his books which the movie is based on.
Might I repeat something I said in response to one of your ealier posts and which you ignored.About that...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hawGbdscMzIhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnJUHwJXV2E&feature=relatedhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_literatureAnd if you’ve ever seen Battle of Algiers and the Guns of Navarone I guarantee you’ll experience deja-vu throughout a sizable chunk of Red Dawn’s third act. The arrival of the spetsnaz and the briefing is an obvious homage to a sequence from Algiers, the betrayal bit plays out in a very similar way to a scene from Navarone.
Point: Everything is similar to something else. It's not a valid criticism for anything.
You cant hardly watch the movie without a scene that looks like it was copied from Red Dawn.
I didn't think that any of the main characters in the books or the film were that similar to the main characters in Red Dawn.
I didn't think the movie looked or sounded anything like Red Dawn. Unless you thought Red Dawn looked and sounded like a music video. I don't remember any really similar dialog.
Because of the way they are written (read quotes below), the books are even less like Red Dawn. A teenage girl writing a diary is far removed from the way the concept is approached in RD. In the books John Marsden focuses a lot on Ellie's internal struggles (The movie didn't cover this). TWTWB is more character centric whereas RD was more about the conflict at the expense of the characters. Any character in RD who isn't played Powers Boothe or Harry Dean Stanton or Patrick Swayze is forgettable.
***
...And then the horror of it hit me. Corrie was my age, my friend, my best, best friend who I shared my childhood with. This was Corrie, whose mother found her crying in her bathroom when she was four and when she asked her what was wrong Corrie sobbed, ‘Ellie told me to go to my room, and I haven’t even done anything wrong!’ Corrie, who played school with me, when we used poddy lambs as the students and tried to make the poor stupid things stand in straight lines for their lessons. Corrie, who had conspired with me to be naughty on day in grade 1, and we threw Eleanor’s lunch in the rubbish tin and filler her lunch box with sheep droppings. We got in so much trouble we were shocked. We hadn’t realised how naughty we were being. But only a week later we through or undies on the overhead fan when we were getting changed for swimming and one pair flew off into Mrs Mercer’s face.
We played dentists when we were seven and I actually pulled out one of Corries teeth. It was loose anyway, of course, and she didn’t mind, but Mrs Mackenzie was a bit flabbergasted. We put on puppet shows and magic shows for our families and charged them twenty cents to enter. We shared a bag of sherbet knocked off from her Mum’s shopping bag, then somehow convinced ourselves it was Ratsak and we panicked and rushed to the tap and tried to wash it all out of our mouths. We lay in our tent on our first campout, sucking tubes of toothpaste. Another time we pretended we were married, and we kissed and felt each other the way we imagined married people did. And on another campout we managed to persuade ourselves that there was a boogie-monster outside the tent, until we got so scared we rushed into the house screaming and refused to go out there again.
We were mates, that’s all there was to it. It was always Corrie’s hand I held as we walked in a crocodile to the library or the pool or the art room. Like Fi, we went through the usual list of things kids try. Jazz, ballet, swimming lessons, pony club. Unlike, Fi, we didn’t last too long at any of them. There was always too much to do at home, and our parents complained at all the driving. We went through the grades; 1,2,3,4. We wrote love letters to boys, and decided the next day we didn’t like them after all. We played softball for the Wirrawee under 10’s but when Corrie got dropped for being rude to Narelle, our coach, I quit the team in protest. We tried to peep at the shearers through a little hole in the wall of their dunny. We had a competition to see who could last the longest without going to the toilet and nearly bust ourselves in the process. We dared the other girls at grade 5 camp to run topless to the flagpole and back, and I actually did it, but Corrie, who by that time was getting something worth covering chickened out. Grade 6, Year 7, Year 8. We read in a magazine that sometimes girls who were close friends would menstruate at the same time, so we tried to synchronise ours but failed. For more than a term we kept a list of the colour of Andrew Matthewson’s undies each day, because he wore wide shorts and always sat slumped down with his legs apart. It was a joke, but there was something I never admitted even to Corrie, and that was how I used to with he’d forget to wear undies at all one day.
Corrie, who made herself sick worrying about tests. Corrie who spent a whole lesson typing groups of A’s – just the letter A – into a computer, then blocked it, copied and pasted it, and did that over and over again until she created a file eight megabytes long. Then we did a word count. It took 12 minutes.
Corrie, who broke her collarbone when she fell off the back of the trailer as we picked up the posts from the old fenceline. Corrie, who talked me into following her on a crawl through the little gaps between the bales in their hayshed, then suddenly panicked and thought she wouldn’t be able to get out and got total claustrophobia. Corrie, who fell so madly in love with Kevin, and so suddenly, that I was jealous and had to make myself like him. At first I’d even tried to talk her out of going with him but for once she wasn’t going to be talked out of something; she had her heart set on him, and she got him, and in the end I had to resign myself to the fact out relationship had changed forever.
We would have to bring Kevin here too, to the cemetery, because he had as much right as I did, maybe more after the sacrifices he’d made to get Corrie to hospital.
But no, I thought, I had a right to be here too. Corrie and I were mates. We were mates for life.
And now my best mate was under the earth, under six feel of cold heavy soil, separated from me by six feet and by eternity. How could it be possible? All those futures we discussed, all those plans to share a flat and go to uni, to travel the world together, to get jobs as pilots or jillaroos or teachers or doctors or governesses; in none of those plans did we ever consider for a moment that it might end like this. Death wasn’t on our agenda. We never mention the word. We thought we were indestructible. And what would happen to me now? Our plans had always been for two, but Corrie had left me and I was on my own. I felt like a Siamese twin who had been amputated from her other half, sure I had Fi, and sure I loved her dearly, but I hadn’t grown up with her the way I had with Corrie.
**
One of the things I find strangest and hardest is that we were having such conversations. How could this have been happening to us? How could we be huddled in the dark bush, cold and hungry and terrified, talking about who we should kill? We had no preparation for this, no background, no knowledge. We didn't know if we were doing the right thing, ever. We didn't know anything. We were just ordinary teenagers, so ordinary we were boring. Overnight they'd pulled the roof of our lives. And after they'd pulled off the roof they'd come in and torn down the curtains, ripped up the furniture, burnt the house and thrown us into the night, where we'd been forced to run and hide and live like wild animals. We had no foundations, and we had no secure walls around our lives anymore. We were living in a strange long nightmare, where we had to make our own rules, invent new values, stumble around blindly, hoping we weren't making too many mistakes. We clung to what we knew and what we thought was right, but all the time those things too were being stripped from us. I didn't know if we'd be left with nothing, or if we'd be left with a new set of rules and attitudes and behaviours, so that we wouldn't recognise ourselves anymore. We could end up as new, distorted, deformed creatures, with only a few physical resemblances to the to the people we once were
**
Lee’s eyes were wide open, like spotlights. He moved with the stealth of a feral cat – so quietly that I only heard the slightest crunch as he took each footstep. I somehow found time to be jealous of his grace and lightness of tread. But then I realised I was going to have to do more than watch.
In some ways what Lee had was the perfect weapon. The belt ran through two small rings of steel, and came back between them to get its tension. It was the kind of belt that we all wore: most of us had made our own in Leatherwork. It took Lee, though, to think of using one as a weapon. I had a horrible sick awareness that it was probably going to be perfect. But there was one big problem: Lee was going to try to strangle this guy with a belt while the guy stood there holding a gun. It was probably the bravest, stupidest thing I’d ever seen anyone try to do. I knew I had to help.
The soldier was losing his temper fast. ‘Turn round!’ he shouted at Kevin. ‘You bad boy! You turn round!’
Kevin looked terrified. He had seen Lee moving up behind the soldier and I don’t know who he was more scared of: Lee or the soldier. But at least the man was sure he was the one who’d caused Kevin’s loss of colour, and shaking lips. He hadn’t yet thought that there might be anyone behind him; hadn’t yet thought to turn around. I began moving forward with Lee. I knew what I had to do: get the man’s gun arm. I tried desperately to move as quietly as Lee. Kevin was turning round as ordered; slowly, but he was turning. ‘Hand up, hand up,’ the soldier yelled. Lee and I were only a couple of steps away now, and I thought that we should strike while the man was yelling; he would be less likely to hear us while his own voice was filling his ears. I had an awful moment of hesitation when I didn’t think I was going to be able to do it; I wanted to freeze but knew I simply couldn’t. The only way I could make myself act was to count: I went, ‘One, two, three,’ very quickly to myself, and dived.
Lee launched himself a split second later. Kevin fell sideways, desperate to avoid the aim of the gun. But the man didn’t shoot Kevin by reflex, which is what I’d most feared. He didn’t shoot anyone. He didn’t even pull the trigger. He did what I suppose most people would do in that situation: he started spinning round to see what was going on behind him. That was the way his reflexes worked. I rabbit-chopped his arm as hard as I could hit, then grabbed the gun and swung it upwards. I’d been hoping he’d drop the gun with the shock of my hit; he didn’t, but he lost his grip on it and had to snatch at it to try to get it back. At that moment, Lee knocked the man’s cap off and dropped the belt over his head. Now, fighting two battles at once, the man got confused; he tried to push me away and at the same time turned to attack Lee. Then Homer arrived with a rush and, between us, we prised the gun out of the man’s grasping fingers. He knew he was in trouble then. Lee was tightening the belt fast. The man tried to get his hands onto the belt but Homer and I grabbed an arm each and dragged them down again. Lee started to put all this weight on the belt. The soldier tried to call for help. Too late. I started to get hysterical myself but some force made me hold on. The soldier was pitching to the right, staggering. I lost my grip on his arm and he brought it up to his throat but it did him no good; Lee was implacable. The man’s face was mottled now, dark red with patches of white, getting darker by the moment. A horrible gurgling noise came from his mouth, like someone trying to gargle but doing it in his mouth instead of the throat. I didn’t, couldn’t watch any longer, and looked away, towards the beautiful bush, the bush I loved. Did these things happen in the bush? Did animals and birds kill each other in cold blood because of fights over territory? You bet your life they did.
I had hold of the soldier’s arm again, feeling the strength in it: its desperate struggle as it flailed and writhed and fought. The fight was lasting much longer than I’d expected. I could feel the veins swell in the tortured arm. Then, suddenly, it was all over. The arm went limp. A terrible smell filled the air and I realised the man had fouled his trousers. I stole a look at his face and quickly looked away again. It was the most revolting sight I’d ever seen. His tongue hung out like a giant fat bullboar sausage. His skin was purplish black. And his eyes … those eyes will follow me to my grave and beyond. They were the eyes of a staring devil; a man sent mad in the last minute of his life by the knowledge that he was dying, and by the manner of his death. Every time I close my eyes, his open in my mind.
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