Let's for a moment leave aside the rather asinine political background of the story, the Cold War milieu and the Middle American paranoia. Obviously the movie is about a bunch of "average" white kids, football players at that, fighting a cast of foreign invaders with scary accents; make of that what you will. But it's also a predictable Eighties action movie, and a rather dumb one to boot.
High school kids, half a dozen or so, survive the Soviet-Cuban invasion of Wyoming and take to the hills as guerrilla fighters. I gave a vague number, because director John Milius never convincingly distinguished between any of the characters; I couldn't keep track of who was who or what their names were, so that when several of them inevitably died tragic deaths, I could only react by asking, "Which one was that?"
The story is a great celebration of brainless macho posturing. The kids' leader bullies them and threatens them when they express any emotion, and Milius portrays their transformation into killing machines without any trace of irony or self-awareness. He's already stripped them of their individuality, but his only goal seems to be to create violent fight scenes, and not any sort of commentary on the dehumanizing effects of war.
The fight scenes, or action scenes or whatever the aficionados prefer to call them, are elaborately staged, with helicopters, tanks, rockets, and lots of exploding stunt men. They also manage to make the trained Soviet soldiers look like morons, while the plucky American youngsters perform like steely Red Berets. The overwhelming focus on the action ensures that the movie will never be taken seriously, because the characters are allowed no emotional life, and the real consequences of guerrilla violence are avoided -- the brutal reprisals, the collateral civilian deaths, the moral compromises.
Cheesy Eighties action movies can be fun, but "Red Dawn" is too exploitative for that. It misses all the opportunities it had for thoughtful commentary or provocative insights, and instead just stages a bunch of generic shootouts.
High school kids, half a dozen or so, survive the Soviet-Cuban invasion of Wyoming and take to the hills as guerrilla fighters. I gave a vague number, because director John Milius never convincingly distinguished between any of the characters; I couldn't keep track of who was who or what their names were, so that when several of them inevitably died tragic deaths, I could only react by asking, "Which one was that?"
The story is a great celebration of brainless macho posturing. The kids' leader bullies them and threatens them when they express any emotion, and Milius portrays their transformation into killing machines without any trace of irony or self-awareness. He's already stripped them of their individuality, but his only goal seems to be to create violent fight scenes, and not any sort of commentary on the dehumanizing effects of war.
The fight scenes, or action scenes or whatever the aficionados prefer to call them, are elaborately staged, with helicopters, tanks, rockets, and lots of exploding stunt men. They also manage to make the trained Soviet soldiers look like morons, while the plucky American youngsters perform like steely Red Berets. The overwhelming focus on the action ensures that the movie will never be taken seriously, because the characters are allowed no emotional life, and the real consequences of guerrilla violence are avoided -- the brutal reprisals, the collateral civilian deaths, the moral compromises.
Cheesy Eighties action movies can be fun, but "Red Dawn" is too exploitative for that. It misses all the opportunities it had for thoughtful commentary or provocative insights, and instead just stages a bunch of generic shootouts.