Has anyone else really enjoyed "Red Dawn"?

[More Than A Feeling]

Then again, I am also a big fan of Starship Troopers, so I shouldn't be surprised!O8)

[gater]

1. Wolverines! Wolverines!

First flick I ever heard in surround sound (sort of) when it first came out on VHS. I say sort of because it was actually quadraphonic, not really 5:1 surround...it was still cool though, the missiles and stuff.

[solinvictus]

2. Yep..

One of my favorite action movies.

[CanuckAmok]

3. Wow...Red Dawn!

That takes me back. What a propaganda piece. I even remember some veiled reference to those rotten Soviet soldiers sodomising one of the "Wolverine" girls.

Just awful.


Starship Troopers, OTOH, is a pretty good criticism of blind jingoism, xenophobia and imperialism, if you can get past the brain-sucking and the explosions.

[edbermac]

4. Red Dawn was stupid, Troopers was great...

The enemy in Red Dawn attacks some backwater out in the middle of nowhere town; not NY, not Washington DC, not some military installation, just some shit town that looks like the local law enforcement consists of Sherriff Andy and Deputy Barney Fife...that's what was stupid about it...the place looked like it could have been overrun by a pack of Commie Girl Scouts...

[terrya]

5. John Milius, the director, is a right wing tool.

That film was nothing more than right wing paranoid bullshit. Vile crapola.

[More Than A Feeling]

7. Yeah, I know

The anti-immigrant theme when the colonel is describing how they came up from Mexico, the guns, the excessive patriotism..

At the same time, though, I think it does an ok job of showing how the kids are in danger of losing their grip on their humanity. And the villains are not all caricatures.

Plus, it delivered what I wanted tonight, which was explosions and pure hard core action.

[Conservativesux]

9. Losing thier grip on humanity like the poor grunts in Iraq?

Lets get our troops home now!

[MrSlayer]

6. I liked the movie.

I would be the C. Thomas Howell character.

[autorank]

8. Red Dawn is an inverted "Blob"

Watch the original "Blob", written by a leftie black-listed Hollywood writer. It is a total slam against authority and hysteria with the teenagers leading the way and the police and parents looking like morons.

Red Dawn endorses paranoia, makes the teenagers clones of their idiot parents, and is essentially a fascist movie...just the opposite of "The Blob."

IMHO, but what do I know?

[General Zod]

10. I can't tell you how much I hate that movie...

.....We were supposed to believe that a bunch of high school kids could take on the Red Army.

It had absolutely no redeeming qualities, except for the actor who played the Cuban general. He was good. Everything else was shit.

Right-wing propaganda at its most ridiculous.

[Melynn]

11. Freeper movie before there was Freepers

Stupid right wing Reagan-era propaganda.

[Dogmudgeon]

12. You ideologues miss the whole point. As usual.

What were the Wolverines (the kids) doing in Red Dawn that today's insurgencies in the Middle East aren't?

Stop looking at the movie through ideology-colored glasses. Milius might be a conservative, but the inspiration for the movie's script (not its concept) was the insurgency in Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion. That same insurgency spawned leaders and a freedom movement that we first abandoned, then stabbed in the back, and who then later gave us al-Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden.

There was another army of resistance fighters who did pretty well -- the Continental Army which fought the tyranny of the original rat-bastard King George.

The humanization of the Latino commandant (Cuban, or maybe Sandinista) was also an intriguing development. Milius showed himself to be more than a stock Freeper with that. He understood the dynamics of military leadership, and how it's usually the abstracted, self-absorbed career men at the top of the political food chain (in this case, the Politburo) who are the real source of evil.

One of the most moving parts of the film was the scene where the Wolverines found that one of their own had been turned into a mole for the occupiers. I won't give any spoilers, but the identical scenario has been played out in dozens of cases in different wars and conflicts.

If the USA was ever taken down by a foreign enemy, you can be sure we'd have homespun resistance fighters like we saw in Red Dawn. More to the point, if the USA was ever taken over by a true, hard-core fascist dictatorship, WE would be the Wolverines.

For all the ranting about how John Milius is a "Freeper," he did pretty well at smacking down the modern "warblogging" Freeper mentality. The Wolverines were not gun-happy make-believe militia men, they were resistance fighters.

It's too hard to aim your weapon while you're waving the flag. So you choose one -- patriotism, or action.

The classic models of resistance would be the Chetniks, Finns, and French in WW2. When we associate Red Dawn with our ideas about right-wing militias, we miss the message. To resist tyrants as the Euro-resistance did to the Nazi machine, that's "where it's at".

And I hope "where it's at" never happens here, or has to.

--p!

[KG]

13. can any movie w/ Lea Thompson in it be called 'bad'?

yum.

[Dogmudgeon]

14. Howard The Duck ?

On the other hand, it does have Lea Thompson in it.

--p!