Red Dawn (1984)

Paranoid view of the world, but great entertainment
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
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.

A MUST BUY
A MUST BUY FOR ANYONE WHO IS CONCERNED ABOUT OUR COUNTRIES FUTURE. THIS COULD AND MAY HAPPEN HERE. PUT THIS MOVIE IN YOUR FILES AND WATCH IT OFTEN.