I was seven years old when Red Dawn came out. At the time I was too young to watch scary movies and wouldn’t have even if I’d been allowed to because my overactive imagination would torture me constantly. For whatever reason, war movies were acceptable and I saw many of them. Delta Force, Rambo, Missing in Action 1 and 2… They were all played in heavy rotation at my house. And I realize that three of the four films I used as examples are Chuck Norris films. Being a kid in the 80’s was awesome.
I used to run around ll the time in jungle cammo and shoot at my friends with non-orange-tipped, full-sized, toy guns. Life was CA-RAZZZYYY back then.
For the most part, I imagined myself a Rambo or a Braddock: a lone wolf (McQuaid) sort who was all screaming-ninja-revenge-death-to-all-aaaaaarrrrrrrrggggggghhhhhhh!!!!!!
Then I saw Red Dawn.
Red Dawn scared the crap out of me when I first saw it and I can say that even thinking about it now brings back memories of lying in bed at night being terrified; not of Soviets or of Cubans, but of war itself.
A short plot synopsis is that as during World War III, America has been invaded by Soviet, Cuban, and Nicaraguan forces. When their small Colorado town is occupied, a group of high school kids escape into the mountains. After watching their parents get publicly executed, the kids become guerrilla warriors and fight back against the Soviet occupiers.
Now, there are a lot of people who like to criticize Red Dawn for being unrealistic and perhaps even goofy. I disagree completely. It’s not about how or whether an invasion force could come so far inland without warning, it’s what they do when they are there. They machine gun the teacher and the students. They kill indiscriminately, causing mayhem and terror everywhere they go. As our protagonists flee the carnage, it’s not so hard to see why the shocked and awed populace is so easily broken. Other than the Wolverines, (who missed seeing most of the atrocities), there is no resistance from the populace whatsoever.
Next, these kids watch their parents be executed or discover that they were killed because of them. They didn’t go up to the mountains to become freedom fighters, they went to escape the war zone and wait until it was safe to come home. And it got their parents killed. I remember being a little kid and thinking that would be the hardest thing to have to live with: one minute you’re running away from explosions and bullets and the next you’re finding out that because you made it, they killed your folks.
And although it’s fun to watch the Wolverines wreak guerrilla havoc on the hapless Soviets, there are those who like to point out that a group of scared kids wouldn’t stand a chance against a trained detachment of the Red Army.
This may or may not be true, but I’m going to go with, well sure they could. This is a small town in Colorado. This is not a strategic target, and this army is not a special forces or front line infantry unit. They are an occupier, a police force, in a burg. And if some of our military adventures around the world in recent years have taught us anything, it’s that militaries and governments fall rather quickly, but scared teenagers with makeshift weapons can keep a conflict and a cause alive for decades.
Finally, there are no winners. We find out at the end that the US ultimately won the war, but we also discover throughout the film that half of China’s population as well as many cities around the world has been vaporized by nuclear weapons. In Denver, fighters have taken to eating the dead to survive. Two of the Wolverines survive, but that’s only because they went into hiding after all of their friends suffered horrifying and painful deaths.
Some think the message and the moral of the story is ‘Murica and patriotism or some crap like that. The message is actually that war is over only for the dead.
This movie scared the hell out of me when Soviet Russia still existed and the potential for something like Red Dawn to occur was, although unlikely, at least possible. I used to lie awake at night wondering if the morning would bring paratroopers to machine gun my school. And at the time I lived in a port city in south Texas so the Colorado proximity issue didn’t matter. They would hit us first. If they came, we would be among the first to know and the first to fall. Would I run off into the woods and become a freedom fighter? Wouldn’t they shoot my parents if I did?
That’s a lot to think about when you’re a little kid.
P.S. Do not bother with the horrible 2012 remake. It sucks worse than anything has ever sucked before.
If you liked this post please consider joining our email list, liking us on Facebook, or following us on Twitter and Pinterest using the various buttons scattered about the site. Also, please let us know how we’re doing by leaving a message in the comments section below.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2014