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64 out of 93 people found the following comment useful :-
It obviously touched a nerve, 29 September 2005

Author: doveshooter from Tuscaloosa, Ala.

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

Reading previous commentary, I'm amused by the violent reaction this movie still elicits. The ranting of previous reviewers indicates the movie touched a nerve. I have seen really, really bad movies and Red Dawn is certainly not as bad as the ratings it has received here.

As is so often the case, many previous reviewers are criticizing the film because its premise conflicts with their political philosophy. I wonder how they would have rated this film had the characters been teen-aged members of an all-black football team who become partisans fighting bigoted southern whites in a 1960s civil war that never occurred. Would they be so harsh if the movie were about a group of teenage Jewish soccer team members fighting the Nazis in World War II? they might not have rated it nine or 10 stars but I'd bet they would have given it more than one star. Given the current political climate, they might even receive it more warmly if the characters were Iraqi teenagers fighting Americans.

I understand the temptation to judge movies based on your own preferences rather than the movie's own merits. I recently watched Easy Rider for the first time and absolutely could have kicked myself for wasting the two hours or so it took the silly drivel to play out. Were I to rate it strictly on the way I felt about the movie -- the silly situations at the commune where 50 hippies are supposed to live all winter on about a half acre of wheat, about enough to produce a loaf of bread, the laborious acid dropping scene, the cartoonishly villainous red necks, the lame acting (other than Nicholson) -- I guess I'd have to give it about a one-star rating. But it was a beautifully filmed movie and it obviously spoke to people at that time. So a more valid assessment from my perspective would be that it's an anachronism that seems a bit silly today but obviously had merit in context.

I believe Red Dawn touched something in young people of the mid-80s in the same way Easy Rider touched young people in the late 60s. Sift through the silliness of both movies and you find something people were looking for. Prior to this movie, young people were told that if World War III came, they would either be swallowed by an irresistible communist onslaught or fried in a matter of seconds by a nuclear explosion. Red Dawn said to them, "If the time comes, you will not be helpless. You will fight back and win." It was an entirely unique message at the time and one people were longing to hear. In fact, The United States was already fighting back and won it's greatest victory over its most formidable foe without direct armed conflict and bloodshed because of visionary and resolute political leadership.

From the time of its release until today, Red Dawn has been roundly criticized for the implausibility of the plot. It's quite true that the communist bloc was not capable of a successful invasion of the United States in 1984. But for those who failed to grasp this, Red Dawn was not a documentary. The prologue establishes the circumstances under which the invasion occurred and the action that proceeds from that premise is possible. Would communist troops shoot up a school? Their battle record indicates that if they saw it as or mistook it for a tactical objective, they most certainly would. Would they shoot civilians? Is there anybody out there so ignorant to suggest they wouldn't?

Good Points about Red Dawn: *The action sequences are well done and look realistic. For instance, there's a scene where a plane drops a bomb. You see the fireball first and then hear the sounds. That's a nice, realistic touch. *The actors handle their weapons properly *Beautiful photography *There's some good chemistry between some of the actors *The outcome is typical of what happens in partisan fighting. Partisans typically enjoy initial success because of surprise and knowledge of the terrain. But they usually eventually succumb to better-trained, better-equipped troops *I liked the musical score

Bad points about Red Dawn: *The communists are a tad too stupid for too long *The use of horses is a stretch. *Some of the teenage high-fiving and exuberance will make you groan *Some (but not all) of the dialog and acting is awfully stiff

In short, it's an action picture that will entertain people who like action pictures. It has a unique plot line that has now become an anachronism. At it takes a jab at one of Hollywood's scared cows, communism which is refreshing. Nobody should be ashamed of making it, acting in it or enjoying watching it.

Politically, the real question is not why Hollywood made a film like Red Dawn. It is rather, why did 50 years of totalitarian communist oppression spawn so few films critical of communism? Why are there seemingly scores of movies about McCarthyism and none about the Soviet gulag system? Schindler's List shows that Hollywood can make an incredible film, a film so compelling you can't take your eyes off of it, about something so horrible you can hardly bear to think about it. Stalin's body count exceeds Hitler's yet there is no Schindler's List for the Gulag. And that is something to be ashamed of.

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42 out of 59 people found the following comment useful :-
Wayne missed the point., 29 September 2004
Author: mjwalser from Washington DC

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

Previous commenter Wayne missed the point... "Red Dawn" does not glorify violence and war. Far from it... the movie tries to show just how gruesome and de-humanizing an extended conflict like this can be. The occupying Soviet and Cuban/Nicaraguan soldiers are not portrayed as monsters. In fact, there are many moments when they are shown for exactly what they are... often young and frequently scared soldiers, doing the job they have been told to do. There are certain individual characters that are shown as ruthless killers, but they are generally the exception. The movie is less an action film, and more a cautionary tale of taking things too far and going over a precipice from which it is not easy to return. Neitzsche said "Those that do battle with monsters should take care, lest monsters they become." The Wolverines start out as a band of scared kids running for their lives, and grow into guerilla fighters forced to fight for their freedom. Eventually, they take it too far, and start to lose their emotional connection to what they are doing. It's hard to say more without giving away some key points of the ending sequences, but suffice to say that the kids come perilously close to fulfilling Neitzsche's warning. Those that take this movie simply at face value will lose a lot of the potential impact, and will likely miss the messages contained therein.

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43 out of 64 people found the following comment useful :-
Wolverines!, 15 August 2002
Author: Mr Parker (spookyscribe@yahoo.com) from New York City

Someone else before me wrote that a lot of people don't understand how believable this movie was in it's day. I have to agree with the author. I remember this movie as being pretty scary and pretty violent. I haven't seen it in a while but there's a lot of scenes that haunt me. One in particular is when several of the kids look for their parents at a concentration camp. Harry Dean Stanton gives a powerful performance that serves to show that he's a genuine actor. That scene is heartbreaking, as well as a scene that follows with Patrick Swayze breaking down in the snow covered woods. C. Thomas Howell vs. the helicopter. The ritual of the deer blood. Powers Boothe. The final battle and resolution. Yeah, it's a little much and these days, it wouldn't exactly fly but dammit Jim, I dug it at the time and I still do. I think everyone should see it, just so you can either remember or learn what it was like to live in a time when the general thinking was a little paranoid. I think the movie manages to capture at least that, being what it is, a paranoid fantasy of someone who probably has a huge gun collection in his concrete reinforced cellar. Rating: *** out of *****.

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59 out of 98 people found the following comment useful :-
It's Only A Movie..., 10 May 2002
Author: dijgriffin from USA

I saw this movie when I was in college in Colorado Springs, Colorado when it came out in 1984. Many people dismiss this movie at best as either a teen fantasy or at worse as a right-wing maniac's delusional vision of the future. Yes, it is a teen movie, but there's a bit more to it than that. I'm basically writing this for those of you who either weren't born or too young to remember those days. I grew up in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Anything mildly patriotic was regarded in bad taste. So when John Millius and his friends decided to make this patriotic teen movie about resistance fighters fighting invaders from the Evil Empire, he was just tapping into the frustration that many people (including myself) felt at that time. The scene I remember most vividly is the one when Patrick Swazye shoots the young Russian political officer in the Chevy Blazer. The audience consisted mostly of guys from nearby Fort Collins and Peterson AFB, and they gave this scene a standing ovation. In this post 11 September world, it's hard to imagine a time when, during the Cold War, flying the flag or loving your native land made many people think you were either a Nazi or a member of the John Birch Society. Now this film isn't "Seven Days in May" or "Fail-Safe." It's just a movie that was made at a time after we had lost a war and many in the world regarded the USA as a paper tiger. That's all.

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32 out of 47 people found the following comment useful :-
Sums up US feelings, 22 January 2003
Author: Jason Raffile from Boston

Man o man. This movie is great. As a history student its awesome to look back on these types of things and see what the buzz was around the time of the movie's release. The plot is insane, acting over-the-top, but the historical commentary is amazing. People actually believed that such a thing as this was possible in the mid-80s, pre-Gorbachev. This is not "low-level propaganda," its the most obvious pro-American movie I have EVER seen.

On the movie alone, the "film" shouldn't even rate. But as a Cold-War barometer, every interested person should see this to peer into the height of US-Soviet tensions.

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30 out of 48 people found the following comment useful :-
Great Flick, 2 May 2006

Author: Akos5372 from United States

Being a Russian American I found myself switching allegiances during this movie. I must say I loved this flick. I've always been fascinated with the cold war, and the what if scenarios. If you can relate, then this movie is a must see. I thought this movie showed a very strong human side to the realities of a partisan's life, and I believe it was fair. It wasn't an American Rambo, where one man takes down a whole Soviet battalion. No it was a powerful story of what people must conform to in order to deal with the outcome of invasion of ones motherland, and how people, the ordinary person deals with this reality and how they're transformed by it. The United States has never been invaded, and I found this film to be a great prediction of how if an invasion ever took place the American people would fight to the bitter end if they had to. In a way these partisans reminded me of the Soviet partisans of WW2, and how they fought on. This is a great movie which is not overdone, but is very realistic, and fair. The acting is not brilliant, but is good, and the whole movie works. I absolutely loved it!

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18 out of 25 people found the following comment useful :-
More complex than the naysayers would have you believe, 20 June 2001
Author: sychonic

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

Minor Spoilers Included:

This movie seems to irritate certain groups of people, normally those who actually felt there wasn't much difference between the Soviet Union and the United States. Those folks were very vocal back in the seventies and eighties, advocated a "nuclear freeze" and "U.S. out of everywhere" type policies, opposed any sort of defense. So its not much of a surprise that they would dislike a movie that obviously heralded American values, traditions, and clearly warned against weakness in the face of enemies.

Yet the move doesn't gloss over a great deal, in places its quite brutal and its hardly a glorification of violence. In one of the more interesting scenes a Russian soldier, young, funny, wants to have his picture taken. Minutes later, he's desperately crawling up hill as he fearfully cries out that "Help, they're killing me!" as Americans with guns are clumsily trying to shoot him. It's actually quite a disturbing scene. In another, the partisans, high school students mostly, end up executing both a helpless Russian soldier and an American turncoat.

Though I thought that the fighting between an American resistance and heavily armed Russian Army wasn't particularly well done, the basic idea was sound. In fact, I think it might be interesting to watch this movie after watching "The Beast" with George Dzundza, the only movie I can think of that portrays the guerilla war in Afganistan in the eighties. Both the guerilla fighers, many young and poorly trained, of Afganistan and Vietnam should instruct those who think a lightly armed American resistance couldn't give a mechanized, brutal Red Army fits. Maybe they ought to look into Chechnya as well.

I find the movie to be a bit more complex than those who simplistically assign it to the jingoistic flag waving bin; rather I think it is more a warning to Americans to avoid taking liberties for granted, that we are not immune from the dangers lurking in the world, and that there are those who wish us ill, and that martial virtues should not be so easily dismissed.

Its rather unsettling to watch American citizens machine gunned by a foreign tank in a small western town, but it happens in this movie. And suffice it to say that the story hardly has a very happy ending.

I'd suggest this to anyone who has an interest in understanding the Cold War, particularly as it developed in the Eighties to its successful conclusion under the basic ideas advocated by this movie.

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48 out of 85 people found the following comment useful :-
Misunderstood? What's to misunderstand?, 24 January 2006

Author: Gungrave from United Kingdom

Well, I cant honestly say this movie evoked any sort of political argument or emotive response from myself, unlike a lot of some of the reviewers on here (in fact a few seem to have taken the film or its reviews as a personal affront!). The film was an entertaining, nostalgic and highly commercial action movie from a time past.....and on a base level I just plain enjoyed it. It made me smile! The trailer reminded me of a video game called Freedom Fighters (set in New York, you play the part of a plumber leading a resistance force against a Russian invasion) which I had enjoyed too, i liked the premise, so my flatmates and I (2 English, 1 Irish and 1 American) sat through the movie last night. Once the giggles from the girls had subsided (yes Swayze and Sheen look like babies and have not aged too well!) the opening parachute invasion got quite a buzz. Handled clumsily and probably with an extremely limited budget it took a good 20 minutes for the B-movie ethic to settle in, but once over that the premise really started to work, and you could actually begin to empathise with the kids in their situation. The story became a bit strung out in places, the action was cardboardy and basic and the acting was...well....not there really, but I don't think that was down to a lack of talent. But it hung together, and we all enjoyed it. Where peoples readings of political messages come from I have no idea. I understand that America has it's extremists who hide in the mountains, stash mountains of weapons and food for just such an event, but the movie certainly doesn't satirise them. The joke in the film of the NRA bumper sticker and the dead guys "cold, dead hand" falls flat if it was intended as a purposeful message and therefore seems more to be an attempt at acknowledging the certain irony of such events in the states. The rhetoric of the kids in their internal arguments is hollow and situational, not political, and just about manage to hold some water. The movie is and was just a great "what if.....?" and an amusing 80's Hollywood schtick action movie, no more, no less. If a backstory of a continued Cold War was introduced I can well see this being ripe for a remake, and perhaps then you can apply your knee-jerk reactionary theories to it with more basis then...who know?

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13 out of 18 people found the following comment useful :-
Good movie, 5 February 2002
Author: Blueyes4da00 from From Bellevue

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

No it's not BS that trained soldiers were getting killed by guerilla soldiers. In Veitnam the US troops were being gunned down by fighting guerillas, also during the American revolution it was the US militia that was taking out the "mighty British." No one would know the territory better than the guerilla fighters. Also so what if the plot's a little far fetched, movies are made by the creator's imagination. It's not "Based on a true story." It's the only movie that really touches on the subject, and if the US was ever invaded, there would be many of us grabbing a gun trying to defend this land. *SPOILER* The last part of the movie, when the general spares Swayze's character after seeing him holding his deceased brother was something I'd never forget. I'd give it a 7/10

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18 out of 29 people found the following comment useful :-
Don't hate this film for its "realistic" value, 10 March 2008

Author: Bozo

Here is a stereotypical movie about U.S. radical feelings and fears in the 80's. Soviet soldiers (hated in the 80's) invade the U.S. caught off-guard (a fear in the 80's) Patrick Swayze gives a memorable performance as Jed. Charlie Sheen starts off his movie career here on a very good note as Jed's brother, Matt. And I must say, he was EXCELLENT for his first big role. There were many other great performances to speak of as well.

The action was great. Went well with the awesome story that was given.

Many do not like this film. I disagree, I love this movie. However, I can see where they come from when they say they hated this movie. The Americans were portrayed as good guys and almighty heroes and whatnot. The communist soldiers were portrayed as thuggish, mindless, stupid, pure evil, and with no motive to their invasion of the U.S.

BUT this movie was not meant to be a "documentary" (as said in "Grand Theft Auto: Vice City" , where they say "..the documentary "Red Dawn"). It was meant to satisfy U.S. "anti-soviet" feelings during the 80's. It was also meant to portray an alternate reality in which what COULD POSSIBLY happen if the Soviets did in fact, invade the U.S.

I recommend this to open-minded people who don't mind sitting through some long-gone radical feelings in order to enjoy a good movie.

9/10.

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