It’s time to pick up the Formative 10 Films series, after abandoning it after the fourth entry…
Red Dawn. 1984. A bunch of misfit high school kids work together to defend their town from an invading Russian military force. Patrick Swayze as the cool older brother. Charlie Sheen. Lea Thompson (I had such an ’80s crush on Lea…). Jennifer Grey. What’s not to love? WOLVERINES!
I was in grade 10, a misfit outcast just starting high school, and watched this movie maybe a dozen times. It was set in small town redneck Colorado. Which felt not too different from Calgary…
There was something about the threat and horror of nuclear war, “the enemy” on North American soil, and an underground guerilla resistance movement that stopped and repelled the invaders that captured my imagination. It’s something that would be simply taught in history class for anyone growing up in Europe – but here, safe in Canada, we’ve never had to put much serious thought into aggressive invading armies (well, not for a few years, anyway, but we showed them! *shakesfist*)
I guess what caught me was the forced self reliance, the adaptability, the absolution of caste, and the need to work together to survive. Sure, the movie was violent, but it was a guerilla war movie. It needed to be violent. The fact that it wasn’t a shiny, happy, “good guys always win” story was important, too. The Wolverines didn’t magically kick Soviet ass, as they would have in a Jerry Bruckheimer or Michael Bay film. They struggled. They died. They sacrificed. And in the end the remaining survivors withdraw in the hopes of finding others.
Growing up in Canada, I wasn’t living in daily fear of Soviet invasion, or nuclear warheads raining out of the skies. We figured if anything went down, we’d likely be catching the debris as Reagan’s Star Wars™ shield zapped Soviet missiles over Canadian airspace. Boom and sizzle, sure, but not invading occupation forces. During the olympics in ‘88, the Soviet team pins and jackets were the hottest items for trade. Everyone wanted to get Soviet stuff, and meet the athletes. Certainly no fear, at least.
And now I see they’re doing a remake of the movie, due out in 2010. Not sure how I feel about that. The TV series Jericho, which was a thinly veiled revamping of Red Dawn, didn’t do so well.
{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
I loved that movie when I much younger, but the last time I saw it I went, wow, that’s a bit bunch of propoganda. The invaders know who has guns because the government had made people register them. It was a very anti-gun control moment.
I don’t know – the Canadian gun registry is such a mess, it’d probably help obfuscate things instead of ratting gun-wielding guerillas…
No way, man. This was an awful, awful movie. MST:3K fodder.
-Bryan, who went to a university with wolverines as mascot
never claimed it to be great cinema – just one of the formative 10 films. it was high ’80s fearpaganda, but for some reason resonated with me.
I think I was about the same age. Graduated high school in ‘85.
OK, I can see that it “captured [your] imagination”.
Didn’t do that for me. It nearly “stopped and repelled” *my* imagination, but really left me cold. I was in a punk/sf/weird phase, so it was stuff like Repo Man, Return of the Living Dead, Buckaroo Banzai that fired my mind.
Buckaroo Bonsai is next. I rewatched it on the plane to/from Open Ed 2009
Bryan Alexander is wrong!
Red Dawn was the greatest piece of anti-communist propaganda created during the 80s. Period. It’s an artifact of our moment, and the first scene you include here is genius, as are so many other. Powers Booth’s “300,000,000 screaming Chinamen” line is brilliant.
And then there is Harry Dean in the detention center. As the King of fear and propaganda, how can you not love this @Bryan? And this is right up there with RepoMan for me, the two work together
I forgot Powers Booth. OK, that counts for something.
But best anticommunist propaganda of the 1980s… now there’s a topic. Not _Invasion: USA_? _First Blood II_ or whatever the title was (“Sir, do we get to win this time?”)? Or the underrated Abel Ferrara _Body Snatchers_?
D’Arcy-
My father still considers it a great movie. He was in the first Special Forces reserve unit in the fifties- I was in Special Forces in the 80’s- and I still think this movie is the best explanation of why “the war” in both Iraq and Afghanistan will ultimately fail, just like Vietnam- we’re occupiers, we don’t share a culture.
The only war that can be one anymore is based on economics. China is winning right now, because we’re not paying attention. It’s all about money- always has been, always will be.
The underdogs in Red Dawn were kids- fighting the system run amok.
Our kids are too busy social networking to realize that their future is almost gone….
I’m on a soapbox- but, yep- the movie was better than many rated it- for a whole bunch of reasons.
I have always held “Red Dawn” to be a great film, partly because in my days in Special Forces we were required to read novels (like “Never So Few” about the Kareni resistance to the Japanese in Burma, later a Frank Sinatra movie) and learn how to organize resistance among the “Gs.”
The Wolverines in the movie do it just right.
And, by the way, it wasn’t a Russian invasion of the United States in the movie; it was a Cuban invasion. On screen, the Cubans march to a catchy tune used on Radio Havana Cuba (on the DVD it is changed into “The Internationale,” which was out of favor at the time covered in the movie).
My novel, “Comrades, Avenge Us,” provides a good history of Special Forces while Ike was handcuffing us. $7.00, postpaid, from me.
Good point. I’d always just assumed it was Cuba with Soviet backing. I couldn’t imagine how a country of 10 million people, driving ‘57 Edsels, would have been able to walk across North America so easily…