Red Dawn (1984)

This review includes full spoilers. Proceed accordingly. For other movie reviews from me, click HERE:

Dusty: [to himself while reading mean comments] Don’t cry! Hold it back! Let it turn to something else. Let it turn… to something else.

Rating: PG-13
Director: John Milius
Writers: Kevin Reynolds (story and screenplay), John Milius (screenplay)
Stars: Patrick Swayze, C. Thomas Howell, Lea Thompson, Charlie Sheen, Darren Dalton, Jennifer Grey, Powers Boothe
Release Date: August 10, 1984 (United States)
Run time: 1 hour, 54 minutes

THE PLOT:

(via wiki)

In the 1980s, the United States becomes increasingly isolated after a green political party gains power in West Germany and successfully persuades Western Europe to remove its nuclear weapons. Subsequently, NATO dissolves. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union is devastated by a failed wheat harvest and invades Poland to suppress food and labor riots. Soviet allies Cuba and Nicaragua build up their military strength while El Salvador and Honduras fall under Soviet influence and a communist coup d’état seizes control in Mexico.

In the town of Calumet, Colorado, a high school class is interrupted by a Soviet-led invasion. Some of the students, including brothers Jed and Matt Eckert, escape the chaos as Soviet paratroopers attack. Combined Soviet, Cuban and Nicaraguan soldiers then occupy Calumet. Jed, Matt, and their friends Robert, Danny, Daryl, and Arturo flee into the countryside after procuring supplies and weapons from a store run by Robert’s father. When they encounter a Soviet roadblock they are saved by a U.S. helicopter gunship. After several weeks hiding in the forests, the group learns that Mr. Eckert is held at a re-education camp at Calumet’s drive-in. Visiting the camp, they speak to him through a fence and learn that Mrs. Eckert is dead; he tells the group to avenge him.

The group visits the Mason family in occupied territory and learns that Robert’s father was executed by the occupiers. The Masons ask Jed and Matt to take care of their granddaughters, Toni and Erica. The group begins launching guerilla attacks on the occupational forces, calling themselves the “Wolverines” after their high school mascot. The occupiers respond with brutal crackdowns resulting in the executions of Mr. Eckert and Arturo’s father, but the Wolverines are not deterred. They meet crashed USAF pilot Andrew Tanner, who informs them of the current state of the war: Several American cities, including Washington D.C., were destroyed by nuclear strikes, Strategic Air Command was crippled by Cuban saboteurs, and paratroopers were dropped from commercial airliners to seize key positions in preparation for the main assaults via Mexico and Alaska. Most of the southern United States and Northwestern Canada are occupied by the Soviets, but American counterattacks halted their advances between the Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi River. Continental Western Europe has decided to remain neutral. America’s only remaining foreign allies—China and the United Kingdom—remain active against the Soviets, but are militarily crippled.

Tanner assists the Wolverines in their guerrilla operations, which leads to increased reprisals by occupational forces against civilians. Visiting the front lines of the war, Tanner and Arturo are killed in the crossfire of a tank battle between Soviet and U.S. forces. Daryl is arrested by the KGB after his father betrays him. They force him to swallow a tracking device and release him to rejoin the Wolverines. Soviet troops track the group to the forests using radio triangulation equipment, but are ambushed by the Wolverines, who trace the source of the signal to Daryl; confessing the truth, he pleads for mercy but is shot dead by Robert.

Shortly thereafter, the remaining Wolverines are ambushed by Soviet helicopter gunships, which kill Toni and Robert. Jed and Matt decide to attack the occupational forces in Calumet to distract them while Danny and Erica escape. The plan works, but Jed and Matt are mortally wounded. They are discovered by Cuban Colonel Ernesto Bella who, disillusioned with both the war and Soviet ideology, lets them go; the brothers sit on a park bench together as they die. Danny and Erica trek through the mountains and reach American-held territory. In the closing scene, a plaque is shown in the mountains. It is fenced off and a U.S. flag flies nearby, implying that the U.S. won the war. The plaque states that:

In the early days of World War III, guerrillas, mostly children, placed the names of their lost upon this rock. They fought here alone and gave up their lives, so “that this nation shall not perish from the earth.”

MY REVIEW:

Imagine if you can… the Russians are the biggest geopolitical enemy facing the United States. The EU decides it would rather spend its money on climate activism and social-left policies than military defense. The porous Southern border of the United States allows significant infiltration into key American infrastructure and military locations. One day, unexpectedly, the Russians and their international allies invade the mainland United States and Word War 3 begins. I guess it’s not actually hard to imagine if you’ve watched much of the news in the 2020s. Sometimes, what’s old can be new again.

I am at a weird age range where I am old enough to remember the Cold War, but not so old that it was ingrained in me as permanent reality. That clip is probably uncomfortable for the former president, now, but I guess you had to be there. It’s how a lot of people in my age bracket felt. The idea of Russia as our biggest geopolitical threat was absurd in 2012. (I mean, yeah, Russia invaded Georgia in 2008, and yeah, Russia was a known ally of American enemy Iran… but still.) Obviously the last decade has changed perceptions. Maybe the 1980s called and we told them to go pound sand because they’re not getting the foreign policy back. I dunno. In any case, Russia is back to being (far less absurdly than in 2012) the number one geopolitical threat of the U.S., World War 3 is as close to reality as it’s been in decades, and a lot of people have national security concerns regarding that still very open Southern Border.

Personally, I preferred the later 80s glasnost brought about by the Rocky-Drago fight.

Does Red Dawn – from 40 years ago – hold up in the present climate? Despite a ridiculously good cast of (then) young stars, the answer is no. The movie is very self-serious, which is fine, but the problem is that its premise is absurd. You can sell me on an invasion. But you lose me when a group of High School kids, with no military training, successfully engage in guerilla warfare against better armed hostile forces. I could never get past that. The story added in Powers Boothe’s Colonel character, to provide some military plausibility around the halfway point, but he joined a well-run guerilla operation, not a rag tag. If Swayze had been a soldier home on leave (he as 30+ playing a teenager), who got stuck with a bunch of High School kids, then maybe you could have sold me on what follows. There’s just a big difference between that and the QB of the local football team and successfully killing people, over and over, who are trained at fighting. Plausibility required that someone in the group knows what they’re doing.

That’s not to say the movie is all bad. The actions scenes throughout the movie were good. The mountain scenery of the film was also enjoyable and made an excellent backdrop for the fighting. Premise notwithstanding, it’s very well acted. Patrick Swayze is so good that you almost forget that he’s in his thirties and that the story doesn’t make sense. C. Thomas Howell, Lea Thompson, Charlie Sheen, Darren Dalton, Jennifer Grey, and Powers Boothe are all excellent as well. The movie also provides some OUTSTANDING and highly quotable lines. Some of my favorites are below:

Tom Eckert: She’s not here. I don’t know where they took her. You can’t afford to be crying anymore now. I don’t want either one of you to ever cry for me again. Don’t ever do it. Not as long as you live.
Robert: Where’s my dad, Mr. Eckert? Is he here?
Tom Eckert: I don’t know, son. I don’t know. You all get going. Get out before they find you.
Jed Eckert: Dad, I love you.
Tom Eckert: I know you do, son. I love you too.
[Tom, Jed, and Robert leave]
Tom Eckert: Boys! Avenge Me! Avenge Me!

[while giving guns to freed Americans]
Jed Eckert: C’mon! We’re all going to die, die standing up!

Toni: [her dying words, to Jed] Go on ahead. I’m just gonna stay here and listen to the wind a while, okay? [She then uses a live grenade to rig herself as a boobytrap]

Jed Eckert: [after the deaths of Aardvark and Colonel Tanner] It’s kind of strange, isn’t it? How the mountains pay us no attention at all. You laugh or you cry… The wind just keeps on blowing.
Matt Eckert: You’re getting pretty low on feelings, aren’t you?
Jed Eckert: I can’t afford them.

I cannot really recommend that anyone revisit this film, unless its for the nostalgia of seeing so many future stars when they were still very young. Overall, Red Dawn is a movie with an interesting premise, excellent actors, well-executed action sequences, and a lot of great dialogue, but it falls too far short on story plausibility for a lot of its emotional beats to land the way they were intended to land. Maybe my enjoyment was a victim of the present. Perhaps there was a time wherein it seemed plausible for a group of untrained American teenagers to successfully tackle the armies of international communism. Unfortunately for me, that time was probably forty years ago and not today.