Red Dawn (

1984

)

Sometimes, a critical response to a movie has nothing to do with the movie itself. The critical raptures following the release of Black Panther (2018) seem wildly out of proportion with the enjoyable, but mostly unremarkable super hero movie that triggered them. Most of these critics, if they were being entirely honest, will admit that they were mostly just happy to have a black hero (and a black director) added to the otherwise fair-skinned roster of The Avengers. Likewise, the current tide of vitriol about Death Wish (2018) has little to do with the mediocre remake it surrounds. Hating Death Wish (2018) is just a way for commentators to express their own opinions about gun control. One may be tempted to attribute this phenomenon to the obsessive, passionate politics of the new millennium, where every TV commercial is given undue political weight but it just isn’t so. This particular breed of madness has been going on at least since the 1980s, as I can prove with the subject of today’s review: the much-reviled Red Dawn.

To understand the hatred for Red Dawn that dominated the critical consensus, you have to understand that it was released in 1984; the year Reagan won his Presidential reelection by the biggest electoral margin since FDR. Reagan had been alternatively denounced as a madman, a doddering old fool, and a vicious warmonger since he took office in 1981 but the criticism made no impression on his popular support. Film critics, like most cultural commentators, loathed the president but they were in something of a bind. Their job was to talk about movies, and the overwhelming majority of films released are either openly liberal or politically agnostic, making them poor vehicles for expressing one’s hatred of a Republican politician. Since it was impossible to shoehorn a critique of Regan into a review of The Terminator (1984) or Ghostbusters (1984), the repressed fury of the reviewer class eventually fell upon the most conservative movie they could find, which by a quirk of fate that year was Red Dawn. Just like the modern examples I listed above, critics despised Red Dawn, not because of anything much to do with the film itself, but because it gave them a chance to attack an unrelated political issue. Hating Red Dawn gave them a chance to give voice to their own hatred of Ronald Reagan. Consequently, those who come into the film expecting a right-wing fantasy/nightmare/propaganda film will find themselves disappointed when all they get is a mediocre, juvenile action movie instead.

When I say juvenile, I mean really fucking juvenile. The film opens with Soviet, Cuban, and Nicaraguan paratroopers landing on the football field behind Calumet High School in the middle of an otherwise ordinary school day. The soldiers proceed to murder whatever teachers and students they can get their hands on. It’s a sequence that seems ripped right from the imagination of a bored high schoolboy sitting in a lengthy study hall. Indeed, it’s not hard to see writer/director John Milius as a high school student in the early 1960s, indulging in just such a daydream. Having been just such a boy in just such a study hall, I’d put money on it that the origins of Red Dawn can be traced back to just such a moment, as the entire premise seems contorted just to produce such a scene and the rest of the film’s actions follows from that highly unlikely “what-if.” Milius is aware of the appeal, stating in a later interview that he thinks that a big part of the movie’s lasting appeal is “because everybody, I think, had that fantasy of what would happen if your home was invaded.” Right from the film’s opening, it is obvious that this is the violent doodling of a bored kid, not the carefully crafted political propaganda that I was promised. Here I was hoping for Invasion USA (1952) and instead, I get The Las Action Hero (1991). What a letdown!

Well, no sense reviewing the movie I wished I got, better to focus on the film that is actually there. From the iconic opening, Red Dawn follows two brothers, Jed and Mathew, as they flee into the hills with a few of their friends from school (Roger, Danny, and Daryl). The kids make off with a truck full of guns, food and supplies and since both Jed and Mathew are accomplished gamesmen they have no need to worry about food for the foreseeable future. The kids are scared though, and after a whopping total of fifteen minutes in the wilderness, they are already braying about going home and surrendering to the Reds. Daryl, the son of the town’s mayor (who unbeknownst to the kids has become the town’s chief Commie-Quisling), is especially insistent on this point. Jed is having none of it, and in short order, his masculine charisma convinces the nerdier boys to stay up in the mountains until things cool down.

There’s one flaw with this plan, as up in the mountains there’s no way to tell what’s going on back in civilization, and the radio they brought with them is busted in the initial dash for the high ground. So after a few months in the wilds, the kids send Robert, Jed, and Mathew into town to reconnoiter. They find out that the Soviets and their South American allies have occupied a vast swath of the country, though the American army is holding them off at the Rockies. The Russians are in complete control of Calumet though. The small town is now lined with foreign troops and kept under close watch by the KGB. Milius does a pretty good job getting the details of the occupied town right, from the barren shelves at the general store to weatherworn propaganda posters. It looks just like photos from contemporary Eastern Block nations. The KGB has rounded up anyone with access to firearms and interred them at a Re-education camp, including Jed and Mathew’s father Tom. The boys go to visit the camp, finding that the Soviets have converted the town’s drive-in into a prison. There the Soviets harass their prisoners with endless propaganda and repeated screenings of Alexander Nevsky (1938). Tom knows that his boys cannot possibly save him, so he encourages them to Avenge him instead. It takes the boys a little while, but before the end of winter, they are raiding Soviet supply caravans, freeing political prisoners, and fighting a full-fledged guerilla war against the commie occupiers. In one of the more amusing parts of the film, the kids dub themselves The Wolverines after their school football team.

The inclusion of Alexander Nevsky (1938) should have been a tip for the more ideological film critics that Red Dawn is exploiting a general fantasy rather than a specific prejudice. After all, the plot of Eisenstein’s masterpiece is pretty much the same as John Milius’ opus: Foreigners invade, and locals kick the shit out of them. Indeed, if anything Red Dawn is less a propaganda film than Alexander Nevsky (1938). After all, among the Teutonic invaders in the Soviet film, there is never one given even the most basic human characterization. Hell, aside from the priests none of them even take off their absurd (but nonetheless historically accurate) helmets; less the sight of the mortal flesh and blood beneath inspire some kind of sympathy. The commie occupiers in Red Dawn, on the other hand, are human beings, with thoughts and struggles all their own. Some are drunken louts, some are cruel bastards, but the majority are just professionals doing an unpleasant job in a strange land they don’t fully understand. One of the commies, Colonel Bella, the Calumet garrison’s 2nd in command, is given an arch that cannot help but make him sympathetic to most viewers. He’s a revolutionary guerilla fighter who has suddenly found himself occupying the same role as the authorities he once rebelled against. He knows that his attempts to stamp out the rebellion will just flare it up further, but he’s at a loss for just what else to do.

One of the sticking points for critics was the film’s location deep in the American heartland. As reviewer Matt Bunsun succinctly put it: “The notion that any foreign enemy would concern itself with making such a big deal over fly-over Red State real estate with no other given purpose than wholesale slaughter is only slightly less believable than the notion that a bunch of beer-guzzling yahoos would successfully ward off such invaders when in reality they would just get drunk and shoot off their own toes.” It seems puzzling that they would single out this as a point of complaint though, as the film’s entire appeal lies in the notion of protecting one’s home from invaders. What’s more, the movie goes some way towards justifying it’s setting in the middle of America. The soviets were going after the strategic stockpiles of atomic weapons, mostly located as far from civilization as possible. Indeed, Calumet itself is of considerable strategic importance, being located near one of the most viable passes through the Rocky Mountains. Mr. Bunsun seems to have missed all that (or ignored it in favor a more pithy review) just as he seems to have missed the film’s obvious (heavy-handed might be a better adjective) references to Vietnam. This movie is supposed to be an inversion of the famous conflict, with the teenage guerillas standing in for the Vietcong and the Russians, perversely enough, standing in for the Americans. Hell, one commie officer even tells another that they need to “Win the hearts and minds” of the Americans. Personally, I also don’t see why insurgencies would develop in every other modern nation that has been invaded and occupied by a foreign army but not America.

I’ve talked a lot about how this film got a bad wrap from critics because it came out in an election year and provided a convenient dumping ground for their pent up anti-Reagan feelings. While that is true, it doesn’t mean that Red Dawn is any good in-and-of-itself. Honestly, it’s a pretty mediocre action film made all the worse by the hyperbolic opinions around it. The action sequences themselves have nice production values, and it is always fun to watch military hardware be smashed and blow-up convincingly on film. Yet they are hampered by a weakness in the characters waging the war. The kids are nothing but boring stereotypes and are never given a chance to grow outside their shallow characterizations. It makes the drama of the third act almost unbearably maudlin. I simply didn’t care about any of the characters enough to be invested emotionally in their struggle. Hell, I found the plight of Colonel Bella, trying to repress a guerilla resistance very similar to the one he founded a career organizing back home, infinitely more compelling. There are glimmers of potential here and there, mostly in terms of an artfully constructed shot (the final image of the two brothers is particularly striking) but without an emotional core to ground it, the film is all flash and no substance.