Runtime: 114 minutes
Directed by: John Milius
Starring: Many famous faces
From: United Artists
Wolverines!
I had free time today in Kansas (my nephews all have school now) so in the early afternoon today this was streamed on Max as it's a picture never discussed by me before & it was about time I saw a pretty dopey, preposterous film which features politics that many will describe as “questionable” but I'll get to that in a moment. Not a surprise that director/writer John Milius would include references to such historical figures as Teddy Roosevelt, Genghis Khan and famous mountaineer Jim Bridger—I'm sure he loves them all. Whoever came up with the great sight gag of the town's cinema showing old Soviet movies like Alexander Nevsky-brilliant.
Originally this was written by Kevin Reynolds to be a modest anti-war movie. No one was interested; however, once Milius and General Alexander Haig (a member of MGM's board at the time and for a short time Secretary of State under Reagan) entered the picture, this became a tale where World War III due to a chain of events in that film's world-including the dissolution of NATO-that caused some youths in the real-life city of Calumet, Colorado to become self-sufficient in the mountains and do battle against an alliance of Soviets, Cubans, and Nicaraguans. Technically this is also anti-war in presenting how miserable Soviet occupation would be, but... it's wild that MGM rushed this production as they wanted a big summer release.
The movie wastes no time-the invasion happens only a few minutes in. It is trash as we're supposed to root for teens becoming guerilla freedom fighters (directly compared with the Mujahideen at one point... which is awkward 40 years later) and presenting some rather brutal, harsh messages along the way. It's impossible not to address how this seems like a right-winger's wet dream to see cartoonishly evil Soviet villains defeated by brave, patriotic teenagers or young adults using bombs and guns and we're doing it on our own as Europe “is sitting this out.” Believe me, my not giving this a negative rating should NOT be seen as an endorsement of every political message presented here, or even such details as characters, character development, plot progression, or story beats.
That said, this is crap that at least I can laugh at and it has quite the cast of faces that would become famous later (Swazye, Sheen, Thomas Howell) or character actors in small roles (Harry Dean Stanton, Powers Boothe, & Ben Johnson but there's others; Ron O'Neal has a more substantial part) and plenty of action that at least looks nice due to the cinematography and a nice score from Basil Poledouris. My complaints are mostly related to the script; thankfully I can laugh at this jingoism in 2024. I can only imagine how bad the 2012 remake is; whether it copied the mistakes of this or created new ones for “a modern film”, my likelihood of loathing that: high.
The likelihood of someone rating the OG Red Dawn as loathsome: possible. Me, not taking the picture seriously is an asset in this case. After all, the viewer gets to see Lea Thompson & Jennifer Grey firing machine guns, along with planting bombs at places while acting like innocent women—now there's tactics from World War II.
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