Red Dawn
| Red Dawn | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Directed by | John Milius |
| Written by | John Milius Kevin Reynolds |
| Produced by | Sidney Beckerman, Buzz Feitshans |
| Starring | Patrick Swayze Charlie Sheen Lea Thompson Harry Dean Stanton Powers Boothe Jennifer Grey C. Thomas Howell |
| Cinematography | Ric Waite |
| Edited by | Thom Noble |
| Music by | Basil Poledouris |
| Distributed by | MGM/UA Entertainment Co. |
Release dates | August 10, 1984 |
Running time | 114 minutes |
| Language | English |
| Budget | 4,200,000 USD |
Red Dawn is a 1984 film by John Milius about an invasion of the United States by the Soviet Union and Cuba, and the resulting guerrilla actions of a group of American high school students in the fictional town of Calumet, Colorado. The movie features Patrick Swayze, C. Thomas Howell, Lea Thompson, Charlie Sheen, Jennifer Grey, and Powers Boothe.
Produced in the last decade of the Cold War, Red Dawn has become something of a cult classic and has become a touchstone of 1980's pop culture. Red Dawn was the first movie to be released with a PG-13 rating (The Flamingo Kid was the first film to actually receive the rating, but was not released for 5 months after certification.)
Plot summary
Template:Spoiler The film’s plot involves a Soviet and Cuban/Latin American invasion of the United States in the late 1980s, igniting a world war. The story is about young people resisting the resulting Soviet occupation.
The film is set in a small Colorado town. The opening scene featured a massive airdrop by airborne forces into the town and school. The storyline centers around a group of teenagers who flee to the hills to escape the Soviets, and eventually begin an insurgency against Soviet occupational forces. The Colorado high school students call themselves the Wolverines after their school’s team/mascot and proceed to launch raids, set ambushes, use sniper attacks, plant bombs, and even execute a Russian prisoner and one of their own (who had tried to betray them to the Soviets) during their campaign.
Over time, the Wolverines are joined by a downed fighter pilot, who instructs them in more formal military tactics, culminating in the Wolverines liberating a "political prisoner camp" in town where the Soviets had rounded up citizens who they thought might offer resistance to their occupation.
Eventually, they make a disastrous foray to the front lines of the war in a Rocky Mountain pass where American and Soviet tanks are engaging each other, resulting in the death of two Wolverines: Tanner (the pilot) and the character known as Aardvark.
The Soviet military officers in charge of the occupation of their hometown now view the Wolverines as a serious threat. At first, they tried to root them out by making reprisals against the civilian population every time the Wolverines attacked, but this only results in the civilians lending increasingly high support to the Wolverines. The Soviets then embark on a new plan to trap the Wolverines; the collaborating mayor of the town gives up his own son, a Wolverine, to the Soviets, who force him to swallow a tracking device.
Subsequently, their leader, Jed, realizes that they were set up. Daryl admits his complicity, explaining that he only did it as a result of coercion. Jed kills a captured Russian but is unable to bring himself to kill his friend Daryl. Robert ends up killing Daryl to end the threat of the Soviets tracking them. From this point things become increasingly hard for the Wolverines; they begin to spiral downhill as attrition takes its toll on their numbers. The Soviet occupation forces are starting to wear them to the breaking point, although thanks to the Wolverines, the Soviet hopes for keeping the civilian population shocked into complacency and unable to fight back have completely collapsed.
The remaining Wolverines are then ambushed while eating food dropped from a passing Soviet convoy they had intended to attack. Several heavily armed Mi-24 helicopter gunships appear and attack the Wolverines, and though Robert is able to disable one with an RPG, they suffer losses, with both Toni and Robert being killed in the attack.
This cuts the Wolverines down to just Jed and his brother Matt, along with Danny and Erica. At this point Jed realizes that they can't outlast the Soviets and if they keep fighting they will all die, so he tells Danny and Erica to head for "Free America," insisting that some of their number must survive. The two brothers, meanwhile, stage a diversionary attack on the Soviet occupation’s headquarters in town so that Danny and Erica can escape. Jed and his brother are both shot and mortally wounded—Jed manages to shoot and kill the Russian commander of the town’s occupation, but is shot by him in turn. Staggering away as he carries his brother in his arms, a Cuban officer in the town’s occupation has the chance to shoot the two brothers, but decides to let them go. The Cuban officer had been composing a letter to his wife just minutes before the attack, telling her he was planning on handing in his resignation. He says, vaya con dios to the brothers, meaning "go with God". Jed slumps onto a park bench in a nearby playground while cradling his brother, insisting that their father will come soon to take them home. Meanwhile, the last two surviving Wolverines are shown to have successfully escaped into "Free American" territory.
The film’s epilogue suggests that the United States won the war several years later; a plaque is displayed with "Partisan Rock" in the background, which pays tribute to the Wolverines killed in action, and reveals that the events in the film occurred during the "early days of World War III."
Characters
Jed Eckert (Patrick Swayze) - The leader of the Wolverines and the only one out of high school of the bunch, until Lieutenant Colonel Andy Tanner arrives. Jed was raised hunting in the mountains with his father and younger brother Matt. He is skilled in the art of survival and hunting. Jed’s fate is unknown, but he presumably died in the end. He was shot in the side when confronting a Russian after his younger brother Matt was shot. Jed was left in the cold sitting on a bench holding his dying brother in his arms.
Matt Eckert (Charlie Sheen) - Matt is Jed’s younger brother. While Matt has the same hunting skills as his brother, he is more of a peacekeeper. His regard for women early on is old-fashioned, but he disagrees with the execution of a captured Russian soldier and their traitor friend Daryl. Matt survives the entire movie up until the last attack. He is shot and wounded. He cannot walk on his own and almost appears lifeless in his brother’s arms when we last see them sitting on a park bench.
Robert Morris (C. Thomas Howell) - Robert starts off as a soft-spoken individual but turns into a killing machine. He is the only one who sides with Jed and Matt when they say to stay in the mountains over surrendering themselves to the enemy. After drinking deer blood from his first hunting experience while hiding out in the mountains and then learning of his father’s death, he becomes the most fearless Wolverine. Sporting a ski mask and black beret, he is only fueled by the enemies he kills. After Jed executes a Russian captive, but is reluctant to shoot his own friend and traitor Daryl, Robert steps in and kills Daryl. Robert saves the last of the survivors when two Russian helicopters start attacking the Wolverines. As the other five make their escape, Robert stands his ground, damages one helicopter with a rocket launcher, then takes out a machine gun and fires at the second while screaming the rally cry “Wolverines!” He is shot dead.
Toni Mason (Jennifer Grey) - Toni is the older of the two sisters that are given to the Wolverines by Mr. Mason. He wants them to escape with the boys to the mountains so they will not be captured by the Russians. It is implied that Soviet soldiers sexually assaulted Toni and Erica or attempted to, but the details of this are left vague. She is more of a fighter than her younger sister and eventually forms a crush on Jed. She is shot when the two Russian helicopters attack the group, she is fatally wounded and is aided by Jed. Her specialty was planting bombs in places. She places a live grenade under her body before she dies so that when a Russian discovers her body and moves it, he meets his demise.
Erica Mason (Lea Thompson) - Toni’s younger sister. She is soft-spoken and always observes what is going on. She forms a crush on the downed pilot (Tanner). Comically, when Erica asks Tanner to prove that he is really an American by naming the capital of Texas, and he correctly responds “Austin,” she nearly shoots him because she falsely believes it to be Houston. It is subtly (and somewhat confusingly) suggested that, before she appears in the movie, she was raped by some of the Russian occupying forces. She is one of only two Wolverines who survive the movie and make it to "Free America". She voices over the narration at the end and claims she never saw Jed and Matt again. The last time they saw each other was right before Jed and Matt went into town to cause a diversion and get one last attack on the Russians.
Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Tanner, USAF (Powers Boothe) - A fighter pilot from Texas whose F-15C was shot down (asked how he got shot down, he replies, “It was five to one. I got four.”), he was discovered by Erica Mason. She took him to the Wolverine base camp, where he taught the kids some military tactics. They planned several attacks, but he was killed when he jumped on a Russian tank and tried to overtake it.
Daryl Bates (Darren Dalton) - The politician of the group, he tried at first to get the guys to surrender when they originally escaped into the mountains. He usually disagreed with Jed but eventually gave in and joined the fight. His father was the mayor of the town. Daryl went into town without the Wolverines knowing, was caught by the enemies and they bugged him. When the Wolverines found out, they decided to execute him. No one agreed to it except for Jed and Robert. After Jed killed a Russian prisoner, he could not bring himself to shoot Daryl. Robert, who at the start of the film appeared to be a close friend of Daryl, shot him dead.
Arturo "Aardvark" Mondracon (Doug Toby) - Aardvark was Matt’s best friend and was driven to school by Matt’s older brother, Jed. Along with Matt, he also played on the football team with Matt. At the start of the film we see Aardvark’s father captured and later executed. Aardvark was the first Wolverine to die when he and Colonel Tanner were on top of the tank trying to overtake it. He was shot dead in the attempt.
Danny (Brad Savage) - The youngest of the Wolverines. He did not really know the guys when he joined them and he was the last one picked up by Jed when they made their escape to the mountains. When the car overheats, Danny jokingly suggest that they urinate in the radiator to cool the engine after they patch the leaks. Jed tells him that is a good idea and and has him do so. He, like Matt, is against a lot of the killing and seems to want to surrender at the beginning. In the end, when Matt and Jed decide to go make their final attack on the Russian/Cuban base, he goes off with Erica to "Free America", making him the only other survivor.
Backstory
Much of the progress and politics of the war is left to the viewers’ speculation in the film’s first half (putting the audience in the position of the characters, who also have no idea what is going on beyond their immediate surroundings), but specific facts are later provided by a downed USAF pilot, LTC Tanner.
Director/screenwriter John Milius reported that he had obtained the help and input of former Secretary of State and NATO commander General Alexander Haig to create the backstory/scenario, which required an invasion of the US by communist countries with minimal use of nuclear weapons on both sides.
The film’s backstory involves several alternate history political precedents. The Green Party came to power in West Germany, forcing the removal of U.S. forces from that nation and all nuclear weapons from Europe. The resulting upheaval left NATO as a political nonentity, with only Britain remaining as a U.S. ally. At the same time, Soviet allies Cuba and Nicaragua each expanded their armies to 500,000 men, subsequently overrunning El Salvador and Honduras. A civil war in Mexico resulted in that country falling behind the Communist “Iron Curtain.” In a parallel to Operation Barbarossa, the Soviet Union, like Nazi Germany, now had a broad base from which to invade its primary enemy, and thousands of troops from satellite nations to augment their own armies.
During this time, the Soviet Union was suffering its worst wheat harvest in 55 years and food riots throughout the Warsaw Pact. Apparently desperate for food to feed its people, the Soviet Union and its Latin American allies launched a full scale invasion of the United States. Although the movie was released in 1984, the story itself takes place in the near future, probably 1988 or 1989 since the Holodomor of 1932-1934 is most likely the previous “worst wheat harvest” that is referred to as being 55 years ago. The Soviets utilize a three-phase attack. First, they use tactical nuclear strikes to destroy key points of communication including several major U.S. cities (Omaha, Kansas City and Washington, D.C. are specifically cited). Tactical nuclear weapons are also used to destroy ICBM bases in Montana and the Dakotas. In addition, it is hinted that Cuban infiltrators aid in confusing U.S. forces by raiding Strategic Air Command bases throughout the Midwest and Texas. Coupled with these nuclear attacks, Soviet transport aircraft slipped through the U.S. radar disguised as commercial airlines. These planes contained crack Soviet VDV airborne troops and Spetsnaz troops. The second phase saw Mexican, Nicaraguan, and other Central American Communist armies (with small contingents of Soviet forces) pouring across the U.S.-Mexico border into the Great Plains of the United States. The Soviets themselves invaded Alaska from Siberia. They crossed into Canada occupying the Yukon, British Colombia and Western Alberta, Most likely including Calgary, and cut the Alaskan Pipeline, but were decisively stopped at the U.S.-Canadian border by U.S. forces.
Elsewhere, Britain remained loyal to her American allies, but suffered heavily for it. China also declared war upon the Soviet Union; the reason for this is unexplained, though there is some long-standing animosity between the two powers resulting from the Sino-Soviet split. Colonel Tanner cryptically refers to there being some 400 million fewer “screaming Chinamen,” these people were probably killed as a result of a massive Soviet nuclear strike. In the film, the effects of the nuclear weapons are not shown, as the location (northern Colorado) is far from any contaminated sites.
The Communist forces manage to occupy and control a large chunk of the central United States, extending as far west as the Rocky Mountains, and north to Cheyenne, Wyoming across Kansas to the Mississippi River in the east. Denver is also under siege.
Once the lines are stabilized, it quickly becomes a conventional war with both sides ceasing their use of nuclear weapons. Colonel Tanner explains that the Soviets are reluctant to use any more nuclear weapons, as they want to conquer the United States, not destroy it utterly, and the U.S. government is unwilling to use tactical nuclear weapons on or over their own soil against the invading armies. The Soviets work through American collaborators at the local level to help them maintain order.
Themes
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The movie intensified American audiences’ Cold War fears, perhaps intentionally. At the time it was made, supporters of the Domino Theory were promoting the notion that first Central America and then Mexico would fall to Communism. After enough of the world had fallen to Communism, the forces of the Communist world would finally invade America itself. The grim and futile ending, in which the resistance cell is effectively wiped out, was also typical of Cold War era action films.
Red Dawn also depicts collaboration, portraying the local mayor as an opportunist who gains or maintains power by collaborating with the occupational forces. Actor Lane Smith plays the role of the “Vichyite” mayor who tries to appease the occupational authorities. He watches as several of the residents of his town are executed as insurgents and later gives up his own son (who is later executed by the Wolverines as a result) to the KGB to win more favor.
The private ownership of firearms is also presented as part of the film’s anti-Communism. Early in the film, a bumper sticker seen on a truck states a classic gun owner’s creed; “They can have my gun when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers.” The shot moves down to a dead hand holding an empty Colt pistol being removed by a Soviet paratrooper, presumably from a police officer or armed civilian gunned down earlier during the invasion of Calumet, Colorado. As the protagonists flee the initial invasion of Calumet, they stop at a local sporting goods store owned by one of their fathers. He tells them to gather supplies and gives them several rifles and pistols along with boxes of ammunition. (The father and his wife are later executed because of the guns missing from the store’s inventory.) In a later scene, a Cuban officer orders one of his men to report to the local office of records and obtain the paperwork of local citizens who own firearms. The Cuban officer specifically refers to Form 4473, which is the actual form used to record the sale of a firearm by a dealer to a private citizen in the United States. These scenes speak to the long-standing issues of government gun control.
One of the Cuban officers (Ron O’Neal) is portrayed in a sympathetic light. While he was very enthusiastic at the start of the invasion, eventually he grows disillusioned with the futile and costly war of occupation. The fact that he, too, was once a partisan fighter, helping other Communist guerrilla fighters in other parts of the world before the Third World War began, plays a part in his growing respect for the Wolverines—exhibited fully when he allows the Eckert brothers to escape—and his disillusionment with the invasion and war.
Although most of the high school insurgents are killed, a voice-over appears at the end of the movie by Erica (Lea Thompson), (one of the two survivors) showing a World War III memorial. The American flag flying above it implies the United States had—eventually—won the war. It was not part of the original script, but was added to soften its otherwise grim and defeatist ending.
Taglines
- In our time, no foreign army has ever occupied American soil. Until now. (see note in Trivia section)
- The invading armies planned for everything—except for eight kids called “The Wolverines.”
- 8:44 A.M. A full scale military invasion by foreign troops begins. Total surprise. Almost total success. A gang of high school kids become the last line of defense.
Trivia
 | This article contains a list of miscellaneous information. |
- The original tagline for the movie was “No foreign army has ever occupied American soil.” This had to be changed because it was factually inaccurate. The British Army captured Washington, D.C. during the War of 1812 and set fire to the White House and other buildings. In 1942, the Japanese seized the islands of Attu, Kiska, and Agattu in Alaska’s Aleutian chain. At the time, Alaska was not a U.S. state, but it was a territory, so it was still U.S. “soil.” The United States recaptured the islands the following year. On December 8, 1941 the Japanese took over Guam and occupied it until the U.S. recaptured it in the Battle of Guam in July of 1944. [1]
- Likewise, the Philippines, although slated to become an independent republic in 1946, was a U.S. Commonwealth when invaded by Japan in December, 1941, and became the scene of some of the most intense guerrilla warfare in history until the defeat of the Japanese occupation forces in 1945. The fighting was carried out both by American/Filipino regular forces who had evaded capture, and by guerrillas formed from the civilian population much like the Wolverines of Red Dawn.
- The script for Red Dawn was written by John Milius and Kevin Reynolds (director of Waterworld) from a story by Reynolds. The original screenplay, called Ten Soldiers, was more akin to Lord of the Flies, the classic novel (and later a film) about the aggressive nature of man, than to the action film it eventually became. Some of the changes made to Ten Soldiers included a shift in focus from the conflict within the group of teens to the conflict between the teens and their oppressors, and the acceleration of the ages of some of the characters from early teens to high school age and beyond.
- The scene featuring a character urinating into the radiator of a truck appears to be inspired by a similar scene in the Soviet film Earth, though the original scene was not played for comic effect.
- Red Dawn’s story and conception are similar to John Steinbeck’s The Moon Is Down, which is a story about a town occupied by a foreign army. The book, which was published during the height of World War II, was widely circulated in underground Europe and extremely popular as propaganda because the people of occupied Europe believed it spoke directly to them in a realistic way. Unlike Red Dawn, The Moon Is Down is purposely vague and does not name the location of the town or the nationality of the invaders, but it did not start out that way. In the book’s early form, the town was in America and the invaders were Nazis. Steinbeck met much resistance for this version of the story from his colleagues because it seemed to be defeatist, and so Steinbeck stripped all national references from the book and published it in the form we have today.
- The movie was filmed in and around the town of Las Vegas, New Mexico. Many of the buildings and structures which appeared in the film, including a historic Fred Harvey Company hotel adjacent to the train depot, the Las Vegas train yard, and a building near downtown which was repainted with the name of “Calumet, Colorado” where the movie was set, are still there today as they appeared in the film.
- Calumet was an actual mining town in Colorado, about 50 miles north of the New Mexican border at the junction of routes 610 & 69 (possibly in Chaffee County). Today, the real Calumet is a ghost town.
- Before filming began, production crews designed and built special combat vehicles in Newhall, California. Among their “fleet” were 15 Soviet armored vehicles (including a ZSU-23-4 “Shilka” mobile antiaircraft gun, several T-72 main battle tanks, and various BMP and BTR armored personnel carriers—all surprisingly authentic and detailed), several Yak-38 “Forger” vertical take-off and landing Soviet Naval aircraft (the Soviet Navy flag is clearly visible on the side of the air intake), and three Mi-24 “Hind-A” helicopter gunships (improvised from Aérospatiale Pumas). The movie’s Soviet T-72 tank was such a precise replica that “while it was being carted around Los Angeles, two CIA officers followed it to the studio and wanted to know where it had come from.”[2]
- Five of the 36 parachutists who took part in the invasion scene early in the film were injured when high winds blew them as far as one mile off target. Parachutist Jim Fisher, wearing a Soviet paratrooper uniform, landed in a tree and found himself calling out to local rescuers; “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot! I am not a Russian soldier!”
- “John has a long mustache,” which is heard briefly in the movie, was the code-signal used by the French Resistance in World War II to mobilize their forces once the Allies had landed on the Normandy beaches. It is featured in the movie The Longest Day.
- The name of the film and its band of young guerrillas appears to have been used by the United States Army for the December 13, 2003, Operation Red Dawn in which the former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was captured.
- The original trailer shows a tank rolling up to a McDonald’s restaurant where enemy soldiers are eating. This scene does not appear in the final cut. It was apparently removed due to a mass murder at a San Ysidro, California, McDonald’s just weeks prior to the film’s 1984 opening (see McDonald’s Massacre).
- At one point, the Wolverines tuned into a radio station aired by the free-zone playing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” evoking Radio Free Europe.
Cultural References
- In the song “Rambozo the Clown” by punk band Dead Kennedys, the lyrics reference Red Dawn:
- War is sexy
- War is fun
- Iron Eagle
- Red Dawn
- Be a wolverine, you’ll rule the hills
- Just get some guns and cheerios
- War is sexy
- In the game Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, based in 1986, radio sermons by Pastor Richards make reference to Red Dawn, such as “They call this a Cold War, but it’s hotter than hell. Mark my words! Any day now, you’re sitting in school, passing notes, and talking about the prom when suddenly you look out the window and there are Russian paratroopers dropping in to take over. What can you do? Run into the woods with your friends? Call yourselves ‘The Wolverines’? Put twigs in your hands, try and beat back the Russkies?” Also, radio ads for AmmuNation offer free screenings of the film Red Dawn, supposedly a documentary.
- The young doctors on the NBC sitcom Scrubs watch Red Dawn in a first-season episode in 2002. Also, in a later episode, the series protagonist, John Dorian, names his scooter gang “The Wolverines.”
- A 2003 episode of South Park entitled “Grey Dawn” parodies Red Dawn.
- In the PC game Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2, the first mission of the Soviet campaign—which involves parachuting on Washington, D.C.—is called “Operation: Red Dawn.”
- Recently, Family Guy made a reference to the movie by showing Peter singing a segment about the Wolverines in a Broadway-style production titled “Red Dawn: The Musical.” Peter’s lyrics that “I’m a Wolverine/And my hatred keeps me warm” is a paraphrase of dialogue between Tanner and Robert in which Tanner says “All that hate’s going to burn you up, kid,” to which Robert responds “It keeps me warm.”
- In the Japanese animé “Sunabozu,” when the Machine Gun Brothers destroy the Dragon Kong tank, they shout “Wolverines!”—a reference to the name of the anti-occupation guerillas.
- Red Dawn has had such an underground following (like Twilight 2000) that it is now being reenacted. Most notably, the reenactment group “106th Soviet Guards Airborne”[1], is the only known major reenactment group in which their focus is based on this storyline, Twilight 2000 and the storyline of the book Red Thrust written by Stephen Zaloga.
- In an episode of My Life as a Teenage Robot, “Escape from Cluster Prime,” Brad yells out “Wolverines!”
- In an episode (“Part Dos”) of My Name Is Earl, John Leguizamo’s guest character “Diego” shouts out "Wolverines!" at the end of the episode, firing both his pistols into the air.
- In the American Dad episode “With Friends Like Steve’s,” Stan Smith “adopts” Steve’s friend, Barry, among other reasons, for liking Red Dawn. Stan and Barry also reenact the scene where the Wolverines emerge from spider holes in the ground.
- The PC/PS2 game Freedom Fighters is clearly strongly influnced by the storyline and aesthetic of Red Dawn.
- In the Sealab 2021 Season 3 epsiode "ASHDTV", the crew of Sealab flip through the channels of their new "Astreoid Smasher/High Definition Television" and come across what looks like an animated Jed Eckert exclaiming "Today, I am a reverse Wolverine!" as he rips out Lenin's live heart before being mauled by The Bear. There is also an earlier episode in the season titled Red Dawn where Captain Murphy turns Sealab into a communist state.
See Also
References
- ^ "Red Dawn Goofs". Internet Movie Database. Retrieved 2006-06-11.
- ^ Soldier Of Fortune Magazine
External links
