Red Dawn

Red Dawn is a war movie about a war that never occured. It asks the question: what if something akin to the Soviet-Afghan war happened in the United States? The movie follows a small group of teens as they escape the beginnings of a soviet occupation of western America by fleeing to the Rocky Mountains. There, they grow from scared kids to freedom fighters and eventually to broken killing machines. It is an ambitious conceit, for which I give the film some amount of leeway, but the end result is a bit all over the place.

The first thing to understand about Red Dawn is that, while its premise gives off an aura of yay-rah Americana, and despite being made in the 1980s in the midst of the Cold War, the movie is not, nor was it ever intend to be, about America kicking ass. This is not an American teen power fantasy where guns and freedom and football prevail. Instead, it has an antiwar sentiment that is caught somewhere between The Deer Hunter’s “war is the ultimate dehumanizer” and American Sniper’s “war is a tragic, destructive necessity.” Above all else, however, it is an insurgency movie through and through.

Unfortunately, it isn’t a very good insurgency movie. The pacing of the beginning is way off. It spends probably too much time on establishing the functional components of the invasion and the new reality it creates. It elongates this section unnecessarily with interpersonal squabbles that end up being irrelevant for the rest of the movie. When the fighting actually begins, the movie wildly shortchanges how the kids are able to equip themselves. They start with hunting rifles they picked up when they first left town, but pretty soon they have machine guns, grenades, rocket launchers, and so on. It would have been nice to see more of how they were able to get these, through theft or targeted raids, like is done in Lawrence of Arabia.

Once they begin picking up arms, the film also never really establishes why the oppressed local citizenry, most of whom are still American, never join in the resistance despite mass executions, forceful reeducation camps, and other markers of a totalitarian state. Surely any adults just saved from a mass grave, especially knowing that their lives are essentially forfeit already, would happily take some of the excess Russian arms laying around and join. However, only a downed pilot from Free America ever teams up with our heroes.

Another strange point is that the teens, who call themselves the Wolverines after their high school mascot, start out quite proficient at their surgical strikes and as the movie goes on seem to get worse. This is the opposite of what happens in reality as people generally improve at something the more they do it. This backwards structure is in service of the plot and the dramatizing of their fading humanity. However, that’s no excuse. It just reads as false. Certainly the members who struggled to stomach the killing would lose their cool and die early and the battle hardened ones would survive, not the other way around. However, it is only after months of successful raids that the movie shows any of the Wolverines having a mid-battle breakdown with mortal consequences.

There is plenty more to pick apart here like the weirdly slow pace at which the occupying force ramps up their efforts to find and crush the resistance or how the resistance is able to survive without shelter in the Rockies through the winter. In short, the movie is trying to impart a message about war and the loss of innocence, which even gets a bit heavy handed at the end, but without getting the mechanics of war and war movies right first, that message is never going to land the way it’s intended.

Lastly, the acting in Red Dawn is mostly terrible. It isn’t entirely clear who is at fault, be it the director, the script, or the choices of the actors themselves, but despite being a who’s who of great 80s teen actors, everyone in the cast gives some of the worst performances of their careers. Sometimes totally overacting an emotional moment, sometimes as wooden as a board, the Wolverines really struggle to assist the already dubious material in finding its landing. It’s going to be hard buy into the kids losing their humanity when their performances offer little authentic humanity as a baseline.

Would Recommend: If you are interested in the thought experiment central to the premise and don’t mind the weaker execution.

Would Not Recommend: If you are a snob about war movies.