Patrick Swayze Movie:

Editorial Review:
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 [Region 2] Reviews:
red dawn
2009-12-01 - it will hold your attention from start to finish. another to collect with patrick swayze in it.he does a fine acting job in it. at the begining of his acting career.action packed movie.

R.I.P., Patrick Swayze -- This film is a testament to your talent.
2009-09-17 - If you put your politics (and your feelings regarding both Reagan and the Second Amendment) aside, and just sit back and enjoy this film, you'll be in for one of Patrick Swayze's most moving dramatic performances.

Swayze, who passed away just two days ago as I'm writing this, plays "Jed", the young alpha-male leader of the Wolverines. These Wolverines are a group of high-school students who, after their small Colorado town is invaded by Soviet and Cuban paratroopers, band together and wage war on their would-be conquerers.

If you want to know more about the plot, well, there isn't a whole lot more to say. It's a fairly well-developed screenplay by John Milius (veteran screenwriter of "Apocalypse Now" and also a few Eastwood pictures) and Kevin Reynolds (who would go on to direct "Waterworld" with Kevin Costner and "The Count of Monte Cristo" with James Caviezel) that is as engrossing as it is predictable. Granted, that's an odd combination, but this screenplay draws you into itself, not by ever surprising you, but rather by showing you how you'd most likely feel, and want to react, if your home was subject to an invasion.

Yet it is not the screenplay, nor the performances of actors like Charlie Sheen, Lea Thompson, and Jennifer Grey (who would meet Swayze again in "Dirty Dancing") that make this film what it is. Rather, it is Patrick Swayze who gives this film its heart and soul.

Not to take anything away from the other actors, because their performances were quite good. It is still Swayze, though, who is immediately identifiable as the toughest of the town's kids who take up arms to fight their invaders. "Jed" is the natural leader, not just physically the strongest, but also the one the other kids look to for guidance. And yet it is also Swayze's "Jed" who is the most emotionally vulnerable, the one who takes the invasion of his country, and the destruction of the way of life he'd known, most deeply to heart. Look for Swayze's scene on the wintry hillside, holding a family picture and crying as though his heart was shattering into a thousand pieces, as demonstrable proof of this.

It is as much Swayze's alpha-dog toughness in this film, as it is the deep pain that he hides from the other Wolverines, that give this film its humanity. I won't give away the climax to you, but I will tell you that "Jed" does all that he can to save his friends, and his brother. Yet when the end does come, he must face it almost completely alone, isolated from just about everything he has ever known, holding on to the one thing from his past, his brother, that he has left.

If you are an admirer of Patrick Swayze (as I so obviously am), then you will appreciate this film. If you've seen "The Outsiders", Patrick plays a similar character here; the alpha-dog leader with a heart bigger then he is, who is as tough as nails, yet cares very deeply about his family and friends.

Patrick Swayze was so successful as an actor mainly because of one thing: Yes, he had talent as a actor ("To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything, Julie Newmar" was certainly stepping out in a new direction for him, but it did prove that he could convincingly play a character little, if anything, like himself), but the thing of it was this: He was a natural leader, and it showed. Everything from "The Outsiders" to "Red Dawn" to "Dirty Dancing" to "Roadhouse" to "Ghost" displayed his natural leadership qualities in abundance. The other actors always seemed to fall into step behind him, even if their dramatic talent was greater than Swayze's own.

No, Swayze wasn't Anthony Hopkins, but he was a man who easily brought his natural leadership qualities to the big screen, whilst all the while opening his heart, and allowing his audience to look quite deeply within. That takes a great deal of courage, and it's something that many actors are actually quite afraid to do, with good reason.

Patrick Swayze died far too young, after a valient battle with pancreatic cancer. He will be very sorely missed, not just for his Romantic roles like "Ghost" and "Dirty Dancing", but also for films like "Red Dawn", which, truth be told, would have been only a "ghost" of itself if someone other that Mr. Swayze had been cast as Jed.

Rest in peace, Mr. Swayze. When I was a kid, I saw this film, "Red Dawn", at least twenty times on VHS. The reason? I was trying to find out more about who I was as a young man, and I very much was inspired by your protrayal of Jed. Thanks, Mr. Swayze; you'll not be forgotten.

Not so simple a movie as some would believe...
2009-09-16 - Red Dawn gets unfairly knocked as a "gung ho" type film, but it's far more nuanced than that.

Yes, it does lend tremendous support to the 2nd Ammendment by painting the exact scenario that the amendment was created to defend against. It does present what was, at the time, a very possible nightmare scenario that warned us against complacency. All those are significant things, but there is much more here. The film gives us an insight into the struggles of kids in other lands who were dealing with real-life versions of thie same thing even as the movie was released (Afghanistan). Red Dawn was fiction, but half a world away, it was happening to people who previously considered their lives to be as safe and normal as we do. Another overlooked nuance to Red Dawn is the theme of loss of innocence that is played up so much. Yes, the film acknowledges teh inevitability of war at times, but it also laments the damage it does to people. Red Dawn if full of stark scenes of typical American kids being harmed (and doing harm) in ways unimaginable to us in our "safe" America. As a kid in 1984, that was nothing less than disturbing to me. It was an eye-opener. Red Dawn is extremely effective in letting the viewer feel the transformation of these kids into hardened soldiers in a stark, cold reality. The movie doesn't sugarcoat it or glorify it, but it does recognize that sometimes such things are necessary to survive.

The Amazon "reviewer" is clearly biased against Red Dawn and does little to hide it, but he was right on one thing. The film was a commericial success, and it was controversial. It speaks to the nuance of the film that it remains just as controversial 25 years later, even after the Soviets have been tossed into history's trash can. If there was not depth here, the debate would have been over years ago, but it's not. People remain passionate about Red Dawn even today, and on both sides of it.



So hip to be smug
2009-09-15 - I share the irritation of some reviewers at Jim Emerson's gratuitous slap at Reagan, as well as his condescending attitude toward those motivated by what he sees as an irrational fear of communism. Why, who could think those ol' Communists could have posed any real danger to the U.S? And I suppose in Mr. Emerson's world Mikhail Gorbachev intentionally destroyed his own Soviet Union, just to be nice. Because St. Mikhail was just that wonderful, at least in the minds of those who would seek to denigrate Reagan's distrust of the Soviet Union.

Now, I've never met a single person who thought RD was anything but a cartoon, intended as mind candy for kids of the same age it portrays as zealous modern-day Spartans capable of stymieing a battalion-sized Russo-Cuban force supported by armored fighting vehicles and armored Hind helicopters. Everyone knows it is a fantasy and enjoys it as such. But what Mr. Emerson does not realize (or refuses to admit) is that it is the flip side of the ultimate fantasy indulged by the majority of the high political and military leadership of the Soviet Union during the time leading up to the movie's release in 1984. What is more serious is that the current de facto ruler of Russia is Vladimir Putin. True to Soviet precedent, "Vlad The Impaler" pretends to have left office but is instead Russia's supreme power. Putin would appear to be cut from the same ideological cloth as Leonid Brezhnev and Yuri Andropov, the Soviet premiers who led the USSR immediately prior to the release of "Red Dawn".

But Mr. Emerson thinks we should yuk it up at the premise that as recently as the early 80's the Soviets harbored a desire to militarily conquer the US. Well, he can laugh; instead I'll take the movie as a cautionary tale. To me "Red Dawn" says, "don't be caught off guard and defenseless". A message which we seem to have trouble remembering.

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary to kick some a-
2009-08-23 - The thing about Red Dawn, the thing that lies buried under two hours of ham-fisted battle sequences and stiff dialogue and right-wing fantasy, is that there were plenty of interesting and fruitful directions that the movie could have taken. This could have been awesome allegory on the loss of innocence, a dark dystopian nightmare, or some sort of social commentary. Hell, I would have settled for an explicit political message. Just give me something, movie, just give me something. Because as it stands, all Red Dawn has to offer is a lot of flat, unexciting shots of people running around in the woods. Every once in a while the characters will do something that annoys me, or something that doesn't make sense (where did they get winter clothes???), or they'll say something really stupid, but that's it; the rest of the movie is a Sarah Palin daydream, full of gunfire and inept communists and easy, uber-patriotic moralizing. The camerawork keeps us appropriately distant from the characters, underscoring the fact that we're barely given any reason to even learn their names; I feel like I'm spending the whole movie spying on them from the next campsite over.

Oh, and this has been pointed out before, but... okay, so, like, the commie sonsabitches wanna attack America, so they choose to stage their invasion from Colorado...? Look, my military experience consists exclusively of playing Age Of Empires II, but even I know that you're not supposed to build a town center in the middle of your enemy's camp; they're just gonna garrison their villagers and burn the thing down (which reminds me; as my friend and I watched this movie, we both thought it would be awesome if the communists tried to win by building a wonder). I mean, the movie tries to explain stuff, but the explanation involves saying a bunch of country names and a bunch of scary words. Every once in a while, there'll be a verb or a conjunction.

Oh, and the head of the Mexican forces turns out to be a pretty nice guy, and when that happens you can practically hear the movie saying "even when they turn into commies, Mexicans are still better than those dirty filthy stinking Russkies. Yeeeeeee-hawwwwww, let's git 'em! Vote Reagan."

Look, I'm not trying to make fun of conservatism here. I have plenty of conservative friends, and they're every bit as reasonable and thoughtful and intelligent as you could possibly want. It's this movie's gung-ho, us-against-them, heartland hero mentality that irks me. And even then, I rate this movie low not because of its politics, but because it's simply an artistic failure; there's no characterization, a flimsy plot, dull and poorly choreographed action scenes, a wet firecracker of an ending, and bad dialogue. Two stars for an effective opening sequence, an interesting premise, and all that wasted potential.