Red Dawn

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Not to be confused with Golden Dawn.

The movie Red Dawn is a classic tale of Cold War paranoia released in 1984 whose success probably says more about the time in which it was made than any number of "I Love the '80s" programs ever can.

Contents

[edit] Plot

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. El Salvador and Honduras fall... Greens Party gains control of West German Parliament. Demands withdrawal of nuclear weapons from European soil... Mexico plunged into revolution... NATO dissolves. United States stands alone.
—Prologue/opening narration

On a seemingly normal day, Soviet paratroopers land on the sporting fields of a Colorado high school and start doing exactly what you think would happen when a bunch of heavily-armed men arrive at a Colorado high school. A small group of students, led by the brothers Jed and Matt Eckert, run for the hills as their town is overrun by the invaders, who force the townsfolk into an internment camp/repurposed drive-in theater. Those who resist are gunned down mercilessly and have their firearms seized from their cold, dead hands —which the Soviets are able to easily find thanks to the ATF's Form 4473 tracking all firearm purchases. (You hear that, libs? Gun control will get us all killed!) From their base in the mountains, our motley band of teenagers forms a guerrilla band, named the Wolverines after the school football team, along with a downed fighter pilot whom they rescued.

From the pilot, they learn that the Soviets have launched a two-pronged invasion of North America, with one invasion force having seized everything between the Rocky Mountains, the Mississippi River and Kansas and the second one having overrun Alaska and parts of Western Canada. Washington DC, Omaha and Kansas City have all been nuked, and Strategic Air Command has been taken out by Cuban saboteurs posing as illegal immigrants from Mexico. (In other words, Arizona is bravely fighting the Red Menace, so quit'cher bitchin'!) On America's side are the United Kingdom and China (what's left of it, anyway), while mainland Europe is remaining neutral.

Or, to put it in far fewer words, America is invaded by evil commies and our fate rests in the hands of Patrick Swayze and I'm on a drug called Charlie Sheen. WOLVERINES!!!

[edit] Messages

To anybody claiming that Hollywood is dominated by liberals and is unable to make a film about "Real America" of God, guns and glory, here is your answer. This film hits all the wingnut Reagan-era bases: environmentalists are stabbing America in the back! We can't trust those flaky Europeans to stand up to the Evil Empire! Illegal immigrants are plotting against us! Gun control means we won't be able to fight back against the invasion![1] We need the most powerful military on the planet if we are going to contain the enemy! And the big one: the Reds are going to invade this country any minute now and we better prepare! It's not for nothing that National Review Online has named it one of the best conservative movies of all time.[2] This shouldn't surprise anybody who knows the first thing about the film's writer and director, John Milius (who also wrote Dirty Harry and Apocalypse Now, among many other films) — he's a self-proclaimed "Zen anarchist" and gun nut who's described himself as so far to the right that he looped back at some point and became a Maoist.[3]

At least one person, though, has argued that Red Dawn has the exact opposite message. At Cracked.com, Philip Moon insists that the film is really a subversive anti-war movie — nobody in the US notices the massive military buildup across the Rio Grande and the Bering Strait, the US has alienated its allies so much that Canada doesn't even warn the US that Soviets are coming, or even bothers to stop them, the US armed forces are completely impotent when the invasion comes, and the Wolverines get more respect from the Reds than from their own goddamn country.[4] On the other hand, the same website has also analyzed the movie as an allegory for the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, meant to show why Americans should care about what is happening there.[5]

[edit] Hollywood Has Run Out Of Ideas, Part 9,458,512

Before you ask, yes, a remake came out in 2012. In fact, it was remade a few years before, with Chris "The Mighty Thor" Hemsworth and Josh "Peeta Mellark" Hutcherson starring, and the evil Russians replaced with evil Chinese coming to collect on America's debt. MGM was planning on releasing it in 2010 just in time for Thanksgiving, but those plans were put on hold on account of MGM filing for bankruptcy. As the film sat in limbo, someone got the idea to digitally change the villains from Chinese to North Koreans so as to avoid pissing off Chinese censors and thus losing access to the lucrative and rapidly-expanding Chinese film market[6] ...perhaps proving the point of whoever decided to portray the Chinese as the villains in the first place.

The finished film was finally released by the indie studio FilmDistrict on November 21, 2012... and by all accounts, it was fucking terrible[7], lacking even the cheesy, right-wing '80s swagger that makes the original so enjoyable to watch with one's buds and a six-pack of beer with the kill count turned on.[8] Shaky cam, you are the bane of modern action movies.

[edit] Similar works

[edit] Tomorrow, When the War Began

Not content to be left out of the action, the Australians, courtesy of writer John Marsden, have their own version of Red Dawn in the form of the novel Tomorrow, When the War Began,[9] which spawned a seven-book series and a spinoff set after the war. Unlike Red Dawn, Tomorrow goes out of its way to keep the nationality of the invading country ambiguous and largely avoids getting into politics, instead focusing on teen-lit drama and action scenes, though the fact that the last book in the series is dedicated to the resistance movements in Tibet, East Timor[10], and West Papua should provide some clues.

The book is regarded as one of the great Australian young-adult novels, and the American Library Association lists it as one of the best Young Adult novels published between 1966 and 2000. In 2000, the Swedish government distributed copies of Tomorrow When the War Began to Swedish teenagers to teach them to like reading. Oh, and it's also been turned into a movie, released in 2010, which was the highest-grossing Australian film that year.[11]

[edit] Homefront

The writer of Red Dawn, John Milius, has returned to the well with the FPS video game Homefront, which has pretty much the exact same story as Red Dawn: the Chinese North Koreans have invaded America, and you are a part of the resistance, fighting across suburban Colorado to kick them out. It's derivative of other modern FPS, but competent. It also has some very good parts,[12] but it's very short, and the multiplayer's nothing special if you've ever played Battlefield. It should be on sale for less than twenty bucks, though.

[edit] For Trivial Pursuit Night

Red Dawn was the first movie ever to be released with the MPAA's then-new PG-13 rating, created in the wake of PG-rated movies like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Gremlins that caused controversy with their violent content yet weren't quite bad enough to be rated R.

In the world of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, the rabidly right-wing gun store chain Ammu-Nation runs a film festival that proudly boasts "free screenings of the documentary Red Dawn!"[13]

[edit] See also

[edit] External Links

[edit] Footnotes

  1. Then again, it could be argued that the scene of the man having his pistol pried from his cold, dead hands is sending the opposite message.
  2. "The Best Conservative Movies." (#15: Red Dawn) National Review Online, February 23, 2009.
  3. "Joy In The Struggle: A Look At John Milius." Film Threat (recovered 25 November 2014).
  4. Philip Moon. "5 Reasons 'Red Dawn' Is Secretly a Subversive Anti-War Film." Cracked, October 23, 2010.
  5. Steve Clark. "5 Kick-Ass Action Movies That Are Pure Propaganda." (#3: Red Dawn) Cracked, September 25, 2007.
  6. Landreth, Jonathan. "Chinese press rails against 'Red Dawn'." The Hollywood Reporter, 6 June 2011.
  7. Currently standing at a pitiful 11% on Rotten Tomatoes.
  8. Seriously — the DVD comes with an option to put a meter on screen keeping track of every kill, gunshot, and explosion. See how Charlie Sheen's #winning streak stacks up against Call of Duty's pros! (Spoiler: he placed third, behind Swayze and C. Thomas Howell.)
  9. Tomorrow Series
  10. Under Indonesian rule in 1993, the time the first book in the series was published.
  11. IMDB: Tomorrow, When the War Began (2010)
  12. The mass grave in the baseball field to name one
  13. Vice City Gun Store Commercial (Ammu-Nation)
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