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List Price: $19.98 | | Label: MGM (Video & DVD)
Salesrank: 4769
Released: July 17, 2007 |
| Our Price: $9.89 |
| Used Price: $8.40 |
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MPAA Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Media: DVD |
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Editorial Review:
What if Cuba and the Soviet Union opted for a conventional invasion of the U.S. rather than a nuclear attack?Then their troops would have another think coming.Namely a group of high school students turned commandos. These teenagers -- Jed Robert Erica Matt Toni and others -- one day look outside their classroom windows to see Communist paratroopers descending from the clouds and landing on the soil of their small town.Skilled hunters and tenderfoots alike Jed and his friends take whatever food and weapons they can find and head for the mountains. It is not long however before the enemy soldiers follow their trail take prisoners rape women and execute "subversives."Now the fate of one theater of World War III rests in the rifle-filled hands of America's youth.System Requirements:Running Time: 114 Mins.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: ACTION/ADVENTURE Rating: PG-13 UPC: 027616081315 Manufacturer No: M108131
Description of Red Dawn (Collector's Edition):
The Ronald Reagan 1980s were all about going back to the future--rewriting the past to better suit Reagan's upbeat vision of the present. So, Sylvester Stallone's John Rambo (a psychotic, shell-shocked Vietnam vet in the original film, transformed into a flag-waving hero in the sequel) was able to go back to Southeast Asia and "correct" history by decisively (and single-handedly) winning that messy ol' war on behalf of America. Red Dawn is a paranoid cold-war cautionary tale that presents us not with a rosy alternative past, but with an ominous vision of the future, metaphorically plopping a piece of Russian-occupied Afghanistan into America's back yard. In this celebration of the Second Amendment, storm troopers from the Evil Empire descend upon the inadequately defended United States and hold America hostage. Stealthily avoiding the invaders, a motley group of red-blooded, small-town, gun-toting teenagers go underground to form the Wolverines, a guerilla resistance squad dedicated to making those Russkies rue the day they parachuted onto U.S. soil. It's a darn good thing those kids had the right to keep and bear arms, huh! Written and directed by macho filmmaker John Milius, the self-described "Zen fascist" who also cowrote Apocalypse Now, as well as the horrifying shark story Robert Shaw tells in Jaws. The cast includes Patrick Swayze, C. Thomas Howell, Lea Thompson, Jennifer Grey (a few years before she and Swayze took up Dirty Dancing), Charlie Sheen, Powers Boothe, Harry Dean Stanton, and Ben Johnson. Red Dawn was a commercial success, although audiences invariably split into two camps, finding it either patriotic or appalling. Whatever your verdict, the film remains a telling reflection of its era. --Jim Emerson
Red Dawn (Collector's Edition) Reviews:
Yes, I have to Admit ... 
2008-07-03 - Is this propaganda by John (Conan the Barbarian) Milius? Of course it is but you have to view it in the context of the times in which the movie was made. After the fall of Saigon in '75 we really looked like a paper tiger. Hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese were either sent to concentration camps or murdered outright for working with America. We had cut and run and no one really trusted us. Go forward a couple of years and you have hostages in Iran and the Soviet Empire on the march --with surrogates fighting (mostly Cubans and East Germans) in Africa and Central America. They have invaded Afghanistan as a spearhead drive to the straits of Hormuz and the oil lanes of the middle east. They look like an unstoppable colossus. That is the era in which RED DAWN was made. Ronald Reagan had only been in office for a few months and no one could forsee that the Reagan Doctrine (not to contain the USSR, but actually roll back the borders of the Soviet Empire would result in their collapse in a decade. Some wonderful images: a drive-in theatre turned into a re-education camp -- with a nice performance by Harry Dean Stanton. A young cast that would do well in the years ahead: Patrick Swayze, Charlie Sheen, C. Thomas Howell, Lea Thompson, Jennifer Grey. Solid veterans like Ben Johnson, Powers Boothe, Ron O'Neal and, of course, B-Movie Legend: WILLIAM SMITH. Escapist fare. Change the Russians to mad-dog Islamic nut cases and the story could be today.
RED DAWN - rocks!
2008-05-12 - A no brainer purchase - Hollywood liberals hated it, then and now, but the movie production team persisted. Kudos for this rare "freedom of expression" production.
Mike
Possibly the greatest 80's movie ever
2008-05-05 - Fantastic movie that helps us look back to our fear during the height of cold war tension. Great actors, though often young, great story, great effects, great movie. Thats really all I can say about it. People either love it or hate it, often linking it to America's Second Amendment, but if you can watch it for what it is, a story about high schoolers trying to survive during World War 3 in the early 1980s, I don't see how you can not appreciate it.
Paranoid view of the world, but great entertainment
2008-04-01 - Red Dawn is one of those films that is very enjoyable once you ignore the preposterous premise upon which it is built. A bunch of kids in red-blooded Colorado are suddenly confronted with a brutal and callous Soviet occupying army bent on destroying their way of life. They regroup in the hills, and display true patriotic American grit by waging an unrelenting insurgency against the occupiers, all to the cry of "Wolverines!"
The movie is fun because we have no problem figuring out who to root for. The Soviets are a bunch of bumbling thugs who want to destroy the American way of life through overwhelming military force, while our protagonists are just simple Americans who take up arms to defend democracy, their families, country, and way of life.
As long as the viewer sees this as a fun and patriotic allegory to the ideals of the American Revolution, there's no harm. Unfortunately, there were plenty of people in the early 1980s who took the "Evil Empire" rhetoric seriously and actually believed that the Soviet army could somehow mount a surprise invasion of one of the largest, most populous countries in the world with a military budget larger than the all the rest of the military forces in the world combined. But that sort of paranoia probably contributed to the commercial success of this film.
Three years after this film was released, ABC decided to jump on the Soviet-occupation-of-America meme and broadcast an equally implausible week-long miniseries entitled "Amerika". If you have to choose between them, though, Red Dawn is strongly recommended as an entertaining artifact peering into the paranoid Cold War mindset of the early 1980s.
A view from Russia 
2008-03-07 - Back in 1980's, our USSR TV foreing reviewers told us that U.S. imperialistic movie industry have created "Amerika", "Red Dawn" and some other propaganda films along with Rambo sequels. Some trailers were shown on, with adequate ideological commentaries, typical for that time. The main result was our huge desire to watch all the movies. Now we can have them completely and - for such a disappointment.
To begin with, not too much is authentical. Vehicles are not Russian, nor is the uniform (most bizarre persons are officers including beard-wearing 'cossack' general). Spoken Russian is not realistic, and the colonel's speech is ~70% not understandable, with words and phrases absent in Russian language. In many aspects, movie is definitely not a piece of art.
We in USSR had no films of a kind to compare (the ideas of US invasion into Russian mainland, or USSR invasion to USA appeared ridiculous). The USSR answer to Rambo was "Odinochnoe plavanie" (Solo voyage) where 2 elite Soviet VDV paratroopers and 2 marines demolish US secret missile base (killing all Rambo-style 'green berets') to prevent CIA starting WW3. But Americans in that film were not described as ugly war maniacs, they were just human enemies with their human life.
Red Dawn is a must see for everyone who wants to have an example of primitive, easy-going, yet somehow convincing Cold War propaganda.
