Red Dawn Retrospective
I was in the fourth grade when Red Dawn came out in theaters. As a kid, this was an amazingly cool concept for a movie, and I was psyched to see it. I didn’t get to watch too many movies in the theater when I was a kid, so it was a few years later by the time I finally watched it. Despite of some of the silliness in the movie, I still thoroughly enjoyed it.
Younger people who grew up after the fall of the Soviet Union and with the big threat being terrorism won’t get the feelings that this movie created. When I was a kid, a nuclear war with the Soviet Union and the possibility of the Russians invading were the biggest threats to our country. It was something that was always present just like the threat of terrorist attacks today are something that always looms as a possibility. That’s why this movie had such a big impact and why the concept of it worked so well.
In this movie, Russian paratroopers storm into a small, Colorado town as part of an overall invasion by Soviet forces. Jed Eckert, played by Patrick Swayze, is a high school student who takes to the woods with a group of his friends when the invasion occurs. After killing one of the soldiers, they take the Russian weaponry and mount a guerrilla war campaign against them.
Admittedly, the execution in this movie didn’t always work. There are many aspects of the movie that aren’t particularly believable, and there were many testosterone filled scenes in the movie, but as long as you don’t delve too deep, it’s a fun and enjoyable movie. It fit the attitude of the time well, but it doesn’t particularly hold up many years later.
My novel, Reconquest: Mother Earth, shares some elements with Red Dawn. In my novel, aliens take the place of the Soviets, and they have now overrun the planet. Mitch Grace, a former Navy SEAL before the world turned and aliens took over the planet, wakes up from a coma five years after the initial alien invasion. He is devastated to find that most the world’s population has been decimated, and humans have been thrust into slavery in mines working for the aliens. He can’t accept this and gathers followers to start his own guerilla war against the aliens. They have vastly superior technology and weaponry and he must go into hiding, but much of that never say die feeling is captured in the novel. Mitch Grace will do anything to fight off the aliens and restore Earth to human control.
Younger people who grew up after the fall of the Soviet Union and with the big threat being terrorism won’t get the feelings that this movie created. When I was a kid, a nuclear war with the Soviet Union and the possibility of the Russians invading were the biggest threats to our country. It was something that was always present just like the threat of terrorist attacks today are something that always looms as a possibility. That’s why this movie had such a big impact and why the concept of it worked so well.
In this movie, Russian paratroopers storm into a small, Colorado town as part of an overall invasion by Soviet forces. Jed Eckert, played by Patrick Swayze, is a high school student who takes to the woods with a group of his friends when the invasion occurs. After killing one of the soldiers, they take the Russian weaponry and mount a guerrilla war campaign against them.
Admittedly, the execution in this movie didn’t always work. There are many aspects of the movie that aren’t particularly believable, and there were many testosterone filled scenes in the movie, but as long as you don’t delve too deep, it’s a fun and enjoyable movie. It fit the attitude of the time well, but it doesn’t particularly hold up many years later.
My novel, Reconquest: Mother Earth, shares some elements with Red Dawn. In my novel, aliens take the place of the Soviets, and they have now overrun the planet. Mitch Grace, a former Navy SEAL before the world turned and aliens took over the planet, wakes up from a coma five years after the initial alien invasion. He is devastated to find that most the world’s population has been decimated, and humans have been thrust into slavery in mines working for the aliens. He can’t accept this and gathers followers to start his own guerilla war against the aliens. They have vastly superior technology and weaponry and he must go into hiding, but much of that never say die feeling is captured in the novel. Mitch Grace will do anything to fight off the aliens and restore Earth to human control.
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