Josh Peck, Josh Hutcherson, and Chris Hemsworth (Getty Images)

In the summer of 1984, with “Morning in America” well underway and a national election heating up, our Cold War skittishness was quickly giving way to militant triumphalism. The year before, the U.S. had invaded Grenada. Over the summer, a team of America’s best and brightest athletes rebounded from our boycott of the 1980 Moscow Games with a big, showy display of American exceptionalism held in Los Angeles, the city America goes to for lies about itself. And the weekend of the closing ceremony, a movie called Red Dawn opened in theaters, sparking the interest of a nation of impressionable kids raised in fear of what lay on the other side of an ever-shrinking world.

Set in a small town in Colorado, the original Red Dawn, a remake of which hits theaters November 21, posited a takeover of the country by a Cuban-Soviet alliance. A group of high schoolers stocking up at the friendly local sporting goods store adopt the name “The Wolverines,” after their school mascot, and take to the hills to mount an uprising against the invading forces. “In Our Time, No Foreign Army Has Ever Occupied American Soil,” one movie poster noted. “Until Now.”

“What both films succeed in doing is asking: ‘What if the fight was brought to your front door?’” noted Josh Peck, who has the lead role in the remake. “Everyone would have a visceral reaction to their home being threatened.” He noted that even a natural disaster, Hurricane Sandy for instance, could pose that sort of threat. In either case, tough decisions are necessary in times of crisis.

“The original came out at a time when kids were still hiding under their desks,” Mr. Peck added. “It was able to take advantage of the political climate. With this film, there was an effort to root it in reality.”

That means both a grittily realistic style of action—you really feel each grenade going off—and obtuse nods at the national scene, as in an opening sequence that edits together speeches by the real-life President, Vice President and Secretary of State to make them appear excruciatingly ineffective in battling the fictional Axis rising in the East. And just as the original film became a touchstone for the Patriot movement, the remake is poised, for a sizable segment of its audience, to speak to the despair over President Obama’s perceived incompetence and/or craven malevolence (take your pick) and his supposed second-term agenda of dismantling the free state.

Appeals to patriotism aside, neither version of Red Dawn is likely be screened at the Library of Congress. The 1984 version is most easily seen today as a dopey popcorn flick celebrating unity and fellowship among high schoolers, a time capsule of 1980s teen culture (among its stars: Patrick Swayze, Lea Thompson, Charlie Sheen and Jennifer Grey) or a straight-up action movie. But its director, John Milius—who also co-wrote the first two Dirty Harry movies and directed Arnold Schwarzenegger in Conan the Barbarian—may have had something else in mind with his story of a robust last-ditch national defense mounted by a well-armed citizenry. Not for nothing was the film listed among the National Review’s “Best Conservative Movies of the Last 25 Years.” And Mr. Milius is not your typical sushi-eating Hollywood elitist. A longtime member of the National Rifle Association’s board of directors, he has called for “mass denunciations and executions” of Wall Street leaders and for U.S. military intervention in Mexico’s drug-trafficking crisis. “We need to go down there, kill them all, flatten the place with bulldozers, so when you wake up in the morning, there’s nothing there,” he has said, adding, “I do believe if you have a military, you use it.”

But what if the military is actually in cahoots with the enemy? The new Red Dawn, which replaces Soviet soldiers with North Koreans and stars boys of the moment Mr. Peck, Chris Hemsworth and Josh Hutcherson, comes at a time when the newly re-elected commander in chief of the Armed Forces is believed by a not insubstantial portion of the electorate to himself be an invader from abroad. The conversation on Twitter about this new film contains both the typical, studio-stoked hype (“This Thanksgiving we FIGHT for our freedom!,” wrote the operator of the film’s official feed) and something a bit more edgy. As one self-proclaimed veteran of the war in Afghanistan put it, “If Obama raises our taxes it is going to be like the movie Red Dawn in these parts.”

But the congruence between the despair over Mr. Obama’s re-election and the picture’s release is just coincidental. The film was originally intended to premiere just after the 2010 midterms, but was delayed until this year due to financing issues with MGM; during that time, post-production tricks were used to change the villains from Chinese invaders to North Koreans, reportedly due to the studio’s desire to retain a relationship with the growing Chinese moviegoing audience.

Of course, it’s effectively irrelevant which nation, specifically, is invading the suburbs of Spokane. “Personally, for me, it’s a fantasy action film,” said producer Tripp Vinson. “You need to create a situation where you put these teenagers in a high-pressure situation. We only cut to the bad guys two or three times.”

Neither Mr. Vinson’s nor director Dan Bradley’s résumés are especially political, aside from the new film. Indeed, Mr. Vinson suggested that the film would be an ideal distraction after a contentious election: “I don’t want to deal with politics. I want to see a kick-ass action movie and eat popcorn.” The cast has become well-known for starring in action flicks, after Mr. Hemsworth’s role in The Avengers (in which a group of ultra-qualified supermen come to the rescue of an Earth full of mediocrities), Josh Hutcherson’s performance in The Hunger Games (in which a group of idealistic teens fight to overthrow a decadent regime that thrives on death and lies to its citizens) and Isabel Lucas’s part in Transformers (... who knows, really?). And yet the film contains a few right-wing dog whistles that play into the militia fantasies still harbored by members of the conservative fringe.

The opening sequence, starring President Obama and depicting an America weakened by recession and thus unable to deal with the gathering storm, was the product of consultation with the RAND Corporation; the military-industrial think tank helped craft a geopolitical potboiler that showed “this domino effect of how the world could go to shit,” Mr. Vinson said. Posters prominently displayed throughout post-invasion Spokane (a world in which nearly every citizen is quietly united in their loathing for their new overlords, though only a few heroic individuals have the fortitude to take them on) indicate that North Korea’s sell is not so very different from the Democrats’ 2008 election pitch: “Helping You Back on Your Feet” and “Fighting Corporate Corruption.” In a speech to the assembled citizenry, a North Korean potentate tells his new subjects: “You, too, are victims. Greed, irresponsibility and fraud were encouraged by a corrupt government in bed with Wall Street.” The villainous foreign interlopers also try to convince the populace that they are entitled and to promote that age-old conservative bête noire—a culture of victimization.

Red Dawn’s America is one of rugged individualists defining true citizenship along deeply familiar lines: the protagonist, played by Mr. Peck, plays in a football game at the film’s start, pausing to get a bit of advice from his cheerleader girlfriend (Ms. Lucas). Mr. Peck’s brother is a veteran back to check in on dad, the town’s sheriff. The family has maintained a cabin in the woods stocked with canned food and ammo. In the era of popular reality series like Doomsday Preppers and an internet burbling with threats against Mr. Obama, we’re on familiar terrain. Spokane, the film’s setting, may be just another local stronghold; in real life, it’s the site of a thwarted Martin Luther King Jr. Day bombing in 2011.

“The defendant stated that he needed to make sure that everyone is fed up with [President] Obama,” read the would-be bomber’s sentencing memorandum.

“[F]or many of us, it feels that the things we hold most dear as Americans just don’t seem as secure as they once were,” Mr. Bradley, the director, observed in the film’s press notes.

It may be a cynical way to market a film, but it could also prove a smart one. Amid all the post-election discontent, one detects more than a touch of Red Dawn defiance, as when Fox News contributor Monica Crowley urged in a blog post, “We MUST ... and more importantly CAN ... fight” the President (who would be ultimately discredited, she hypothesized, after the U.S. economy collapsed once again and conservatism rose).

“America CAN be saved, and she is WORTH SAVING,” Ms. Crowley added, sounding in her appeal to patriotism and her self-conscious melodrama like an uncredited co-writer of the film. As Mr. Hemsworth puts it in the film, “For them, this is just a place. For us, this is our home!”

As a commenter on Glenn Beck’s website The Blaze put it immediately after the election, “The future is either Red Dawn or Ron Paul—i dont see any other options.”

And maybe—just maybe—the future really will be Red Dawn. Not that insurrection is coming, exactly. But Politico has termed the upcoming generation of unapologetically arch-conservative lawmakers (think Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz) the “Red Dawn Republicans”—claiming for themselves leadership and firing at will after a flailing older generation has been overrun.

“When you’re dealing with things like your community, family, neighborhood, your home, and you have to step up and defend it,” Mr. Vinson pointed out, “that’s a fun fantasy that people think about.”

Kristen Stewart.

The idea underpinning Snow White and the Huntsman is a charming one. Epic summer movies use the language of fairy tale and myth to tell stories about contemporary heroes (who are The Avengers but a bunch of Olympians?); why not cut out the middleman and make a movie about a story everyone already knows?

Unfortunately, Snow White and the Huntsman expands strangely on the story every child knows before even hearing of Iron Man or Batman, making it a melange of fairy-tale and dull contemporary romance. Snow White, here, is not the sweetie who lives with seven hapless dwarfs—but, with little in the way of characterization, she’s a cipher.

Played by the vague and disassociated Kristen Stewart, Snow White spends the movie evading capture by the evil Queen’s army, but her most prominent character trait is her apparent beauty. At one point, a pursuing troll decides not to kill her simply because he gets a good look at her. Snow White, in the fairy tale and the Disney animated film, is not a dynamic character, and this film is true to form, placing at its center a young woman whose fairness has obviated the need for a personality.

As is so often the case, the film’s most intriguing character is the villain, Charlize Theron’s Ravenna. She is obsessed with her beauty and with consolidating power over Snow White’s unnamed kingdom, a land that she took over after killing Snow White’s father. Ms. Theron, chewing just the right amount of scenery, builds out the Queen into a character one misses whenever she’s not onscreen. She’s aided by the truly remarkable costume design and CGI work and hindered by the screenplay; far more thought was put into a bodice adorned with tiny bird skulls than into the specific rules governing Ravenna’s magical powers. Sometimes she gets power from sucking the beauty out of women, sometimes she does so by killing men. Ravenna can only be killed by the one person more beautiful than she—Snow White. While it’s unsporting to rank actresses according to their pulchritude, this movie’s conflation of beauty with virtue (in the case of Snow White) and power (in the case of both female leads) makes it an unfortunate necessity. Leave it at this: Kristen Stewart is more beautiful than the world’s most beautiful actress because the movie tells us so.

Given the general lack of elaboration as to Ravenna’s powers and Snow White’s character, the middle scenes of the movie are airless. In scene after scene, Snow White evades capture by the Queen’s henchmen simply by running out of the way; as an action caper, Snow White and the Huntsman lacks narrative ingenuity. Returning to Ravenna’s castle yields diminishing returns as well. Crafty though she is as an actress, Ms. Theron can shout "Bring me Snow White!" or a variation only so many times. If we miss her when she’s offscreen, we yearn for her appearances to have real heft.

Both Snow White’s adventures in the forest and the Queen’s ramblings in the castle may be doomed by director Rupert Sanders’s visual imagination. The movie is truly splendid to look at, and the vast tools at Mr. Sanders’s disposal stand in for any real narrative development. Snow White undergoes surrealist hallucinations, then goes to a fairy-ruled domain that Jean Cocteau might have directed if he had the budget for CGI. The Queen’s mirror drips onto the floor and re-forms in the shape of a man. With tricks like this, why wouldn’t a director keep using them again and again in place of scenes where Snow White reveals a motivation beyond survival?

The film’s greatest and most misused visual effect is Chris Hemsworth, who has overcome the burden of remarkable good looks to become one of the most charismatic young actors in Hollywood. Smeared in dirt, Mr. Hemsworth affects the movie’s sole convincing accent (the American, South African and Australian leads of this movie all play crypto-British) and plays the most interesting character. His huntsman, contracted to kill Snow White, is mourning the death of his wife and is unmoved by Snow White’s dubious charms. The movie, though, constructs a love triangle with Snow White’s childhood friend as the third wheel; this feels de rigueur, as though the screenwriters knew Kristen Stewart choosing between two men is more appealing at the box office than Kristen Stewart independent and fighting for survival.

It hardly seems coincidental that the film’s most interesting character is the one freighted with the least baggage; Snow White and the Queen are already well-known characters despite the fact that neither of them are interesting in their particulars. The attempts to push back against the commonly held awareness of who they are end up making Snow White inert rather than nice—she just isn’t convincing as the warrior princess she becomes at film’s end—and the Queen monomaniacal in a repetitive fashion. If one is adapting a well-known public-domain story to the screen, that story should have the adaptability to bear imagination. Snow White is not an interesting character, but she is a character to whom interesting things happen. Altering those events to a repeated series of narrow escapes (the dwarfs, here, are foot soldiers for Snow White, which is as bizarre as it sounds) and casting a notably uncharismatic actress as the woman who keeps making those escapes does the tale no service.

How, then, should fairy tales be adapted? (An adult version of Hansel and Gretel is said to be in the offing.) While the creativity behind Snow White and the Huntsman is to be lauded, that same creativity results in an alteration of the Snow White character to the degree that she’s both unrecognizable—and recognizable as a typical Kristen Stewart heroine, dazed and dependent upon male intervention. Had the film been more faithful to the narrative of its source material, it would have been better; that faithfulness would not have been for its own sake, but rather an acknowledgment that archetypal stories get passed along for a reason.

Snow White and the Huntsman

Running Time 127 minutes

Written by Evan Daugherty, John Lee Hancock and Hossein Amini

Directed by Rupert Sanders

Starring Kristen Stewart, Chris Hemsworth and Charlize Theron

'Battleship' star Rihanna (Getty Images)

The Hunger Games (Gary Ross) March 23

Your children have been refreshing Fandango daily to see if tickets are available yet for the movie based on Suzanne Collins’ kiddie novels—think of them as Twilight, except with actual murder instead of benign vampirism. Games promises a chaste love triangle and lots of angst for the tween set, but what’s in it for adults? Potentially, some solid acting. Jennifer Lawrence, last widely seen in her Oscar-nominated Winter’s Bone role, hopefully turns in another subtle and edgy performance as a young woman fighting to survive, and she’s accompanied by some tried-and-true character actors, like Woody Harrelson, Elizabeth Banks, and Donald Sutherland.

The Deep Blue Sea (Terence Davies) March 30

The long-absent Terence Davies returns with an adaptation of a play by another Terence—the late Rattigan, who wrote about the subtle emotionality of the British upper crust. This work is no exception, featuring as it does Rachel Weisz (and where has she been?) as the wife of a judge who is engaging in a dangerous liaison with a pilot. The cast also includes Tom Hiddleston, who was in just about every movie last year, of brows high and low (War Horse, Midnight in Paris, and Thor), but we’re more excited about the return of Mr. Davies, whose last narrative film, the moody The House of Mirth, came out way back in 2000.

Titanic 3D (James Cameron) April 4

To paraphrase Céline Dion, “It’s here—there’s nothing we fear.” Just in time for the centenary anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic comes the rerelease of the multiple Oscar winner. It’s been converted into 3D, too—so it’ll feel like Kate Winslet is throwing her diamond necklace right at you! Surely director James Cameron hopes he’ll break his own record by getting this film back to the #1 all-time box-office spot, but we suspect that, nearly 15 years after Titanic’s release, we’ll be among the rather limited number of Kate-and-Jack die-hards who simply can’t ever let go.

Damsels in Distress (Whit Stillman) April 6

Whit Stillman, who was hiding out with Terence Davies, is back too, with a drama that proves he’s still interested in what the kids are up to. The director who blew the lid off deb parties and disco dancing now examines a suicide-prevention mission undertaken by a WASPy queen bee whose idea of “It Gets Better” is introducing her classmates to tap dance. Sure, the notion of frolicsome young beauties put in “distress” by the men in their lives seems a bit fainting-couch-y, but, given that his previous films were all more or less period pieces, one exactly doesn’t go to Mr. Stillman for insights on the way we live now.

Darling Companion (Lawrence Kasdan) April 20

Every one of our favorites unites in a project that might be the Avengers of 1980s Oscar-ceremony attendees. Diane Keaton tries on a new Chico’s scarf-and-blazer combo as a woman who loves her dog a bit too much, and Kevin Kline is the husband who misplaces that dog. Throw Dianne Wiest and Sam Shepard into the mix, and you have a winner. We’re not sure why there’s so much hue and cry—it’s not like the dog is played by Uggie—but if there was ever an actress who seems like she’d be a little too into animals, it’d be Annie Hall herself!

The Five-Year Engagement (Nicholas Stoller) April 27

Jason Segel, tired of speaking to Muppets, has returned to romantic comedies about human beings. His Forgetting Sarah Marshall follow-up  costars Emily Blunt as a fiancée who has taken her sweet time making it to the altar—hey, it’s hard to plan a wedding! Between choosing a venue and bridesmaids’ dresses … Also featured are NBC Thursday-night comedians Chris Pratt, Alison Brie, the inescapable Mindy Kaling, and, for some reason, Oscar-nominated Aussie spitfire Jacki Weaver. We’re not sure why Mr. Segel keeps getting cast as a romantic lead—perhaps because he writes the parts for himself? (Aspiring actors who don’t resemble Channing Tatum, take note.)

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (John Madden) May 4

An all-star cast of Britain’s actors most likely to cluck “Well, I never!” trade their manor houses and cozy flats for India in this tale of white people encountering brown people. Characters played by Judi Dench, Tom Wilkinson, Bill Nighy, and Maggie Smith, among others, decide to retire to the subcontinent before realizing that “exotic” is an unalloyed positive only when applied to the term “dancer.” It is likely, though, that they will all learn, like, three lessons before dying—perhaps some of them taught by Slumdog Millionaire star Dev Patel!

The Avengers (Joss Whedon) May 4

The most anticipated film of the year among circles too young or too cool to remember Titanic unites Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man and a bunch of less popular and less charismatic superheroes in a quest to save the world from threats of an unclear nature. Scarlett Johansson is the lady who kicks and punches, Chris Evans and Chris Hemsworth are the slabby studs, and moody blue Mark Ruffalo is the Incredible Hulk. (You wouldn’t like to see Mark Ruffalo when he’s angry—he brews some Kombucha to cool down then talks passionately about hydrofracking!). Unlike this summer’s noirish Dark Knight reprise, this promises to be big and bright and dopey—just what we want as rainy winter changes to overheated spring.

The Dictator (Larry Charles) May 11

Sacha Baron Cohen is back in character; apparently Bruno didn’t sate his appetite for foisting upon audiences a goulash of an accent and nightmarishly draggy scenes of his imposing himself upon unsuspecting people. The Dictator has him playing the Qaddafi-esque ruler of the fictitious nation Wadiya, one who gets to do fun things like shoot his subjects onscreen and seduce Megan Fox. We’re pretty sure that for all the Americans who were unaware of the Arab Spring, this will be a bit too insider-y, but who knows—everyone loves to laugh at Mr. Cohen when he impersonates an ethnic.

Battleship (Peter Berg) May 18

Rihanna makes her acting debut in a film about robotic aliens sent to destroy Earth—and despite her singing voice, she plays one of the humans defending us! This adaptation of the numbered-grid board game promises to be anything but B-9, with a cast that also includes the ever-more-grizzled Liam Neeson, Friday Night Lights star Taylor Kitsch, and Brooklyn Decker, who just finished playing Ophelia at the Old Vic (just kidding, she’s a bikini model!). We hope this one is successful—not due to partisanship for any of its stars, but because the deadline headlines about “sunken Battleship” are just too predictable.