Red Dawn embodies conservative nutterdom in a way few films not made by Mel Gibson have ever managed. If Ann Coulter made a movie, it would look like
Red Dawn. This is thanks to director John Milius.
Apocalypse Now screenwriter,
Conan the Barbarian auteur, and former NRA board member, Milius is a military zealot, infatuated with the warrior code.
Red Dawn is really a fetish movie, an ode to guns and blood. The 2007 Guinness Book of World Records judged
Red Dawn the most violent movie in history. (Amazing it has not lost this title to a film of the
Saw generation, isn't it?) The only extra worth the name on the 2007 collector's edition DVD is the "Carnage Counter," an on-screen census of RPG rounds fired, civilians executed, Soviets killed, and Wolverines martyred. Blood lust saturates the movie: The camera lingers on wounds and corpses; C. Thomas Howell becomes a man by drinking blood; a feral Harry Dean Stanton, playing a gun nut imprisoned by the Soviets, screams at his Wolverine sons, "Avenge me! Avenge me!"
But what's most unsettling about
Red Dawn today is not its infatuation with the warrior death cult. It's that the movie's historical parallels have been turned upside down. In 1984, the Soviets of
Red Dawn represented, well, the Soviets, and the Wolverines represented both the Americans and also the plucky Afghan mujahideen then defeating the Red Army in a guerilla war. But on re-viewing,
Red Dawn isn't a stark reminder of Cold War fears. Rather, it's a pretty good movie about Iraq, with the United States in the role of the Soviets and the insurgents in the role of the Wolverines. In
Red Dawn, the Soviets have invaded a country whose customs they know not—one of the only funny moments in the film is the Commies' inability to understand the Wolverines' connection to high-school football. They ham-handedly toss leading citizens into hellish prisons. They maltreat the civilian population. They appropriate private and government buildings for themselves. They replace local commerce with their own—the movie theater shows only
Alexander Nevsky.
http://www.slate.com/id/2201320/pagenum/all/This is in Salon.com's DVD Review section.
