Red Dawn (1984) (original) (raw)
Synopsis
In our time, no foreign army has ever occupied American soil. Until now.
It is the dawn of World War III. In mid-western America, a group of teenagers band together to defend their town—and their country—from invading Soviet forces.
Cast
Popular reviews
My friend’s dad was a cop and after hearing me say communism “works in theory!” made me watch this in their basement. After the movie ended he was like “I didn’t remember that movie being so bad” and I was like “I mean it wasn’t awful” and so nobody really learned anything.
Breakfast Club for fascists
I'm still not sure what the strategic importance of rural Colorado is.
Jed and Toni walked (and got gunned down), so that Johnny and Baby could run (and eventually do lifts).
A touchstone in 80s propaganda. Has to be seen to actually believe. The longer this film ages the more alienating and absurd yet profound it becomes. A spectacle like few I've seen, experiencing Red Dawn can only enlighten future generations at this point. "Aveeeenge me!"
John Milius takes an apparently tragic, anti-war _Lord of Flies_-esque script about a bunch of boys who become a warmongering, bloodthirsty army of guerilla warfare killers in the face of WWIII by Kevin Reynolds (that he I guess intended as like the kid version of The Deer Hunter or something?), and teams up with a writer's room that included a US Army general/Nixon & Reagan Chief of Staff, a conservative think tank, and Herman Kahn (the inspiration of Dr. Strangelove!) to turn it into expensive PG summer action trash propaganda more about how them becoming soldiers is actually sort of good. They even left in the detail that most of them die but instead of making that ugly and awful, it's…
the melancholy of resistance. a near-century of anti-communist propaganda, duck-and-cover, better-dead-than-red, and the children are expected to carry the burden of the front-line? all the rah-rah bullshit american 80s action bombast, all the copious gunfire and explosions, all-out guerilla war against a cardboard opponent, all of that so you can be forgotten, your name chiseled on a monument that no one bothers to see -- every war has an end, and that means every warrior is sooner or later equalized with everything they fought against, guns and blades dissolved in the mists of time -- what's the difference between the invader and the invaded? one lives here and the other doesn't -- the inherent stupidity of all human conflict lies…
I've only watched the first 10 minutes of this so far and I am already planning on kicking my older brother in the balls the next time I see him for not putting this into my hands 25 years ago when he should have been doing his goddamned job of being an older brother.
Paratrooper Russians, Charlie Sheen, Patrick Swayze? I've died and gone to white trash heaven.
Me? Liking a piece of propaganda that I disagree with on almost every level? More likely than you’d think.
i mean not only is it incredibly stupid propaganda it's also just very boring. the action is not interesting to watch and the movie is 2 hours long for no good reason. big thumbs down from me. the opening scene with the parachutes was cool as hell though. i think the movie would have been better if it all took place on that first day instead of being like lets have a bunch of kids hanging out in the mountains for an hour and 50 minutes
Yeah it'd be a huge shame if such a great democracy were taken over.
The last few years have felt like living in the opening credits of “Red Dawn.”
Ominous music with orange bullet point text precedes the first shot of the film:
"Soviet Union suffers worst wheat harvest in 55 years. Labor and food riots in Poland. Soviet troops invade. Cuba and Nicaragua reach troop strength goals of 500,000. …..NATO dissolves. United States stands alone".
The prologue might as well function as a sort of fairytale ‘Once Upon a Time’ for director and screenwriter John Milius, the reactionary wunderkind of the same school of filmmakers that included Spielberg, Lucas, and Coppola. Where his contemporaries created fictions of gentle aliens, space samurais, and gentlemen gangsters, Milius was busy making mythic versions of American exceptionalism…