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I’m sorry. Red Dawn shouldn’t be on this list.

I\'m aware that this will be seen as heresy by some.

By: Moe Lane (Diary)  |  February 14th, 2009 at 10:14 PM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

I’ve seen Red Dawn more times than I can count when I was a kid, and this is back in the day when that meant watching it on VHS, but ye gods and little fishes! – that movie was awful. I don’t care what NRO thinks. Personally, I’d add Iron Man to the list, but only because doing so thoroughly mocks the antiwar movement’s ultimately unsuccessful attempt to list cowardice and hypocrisy among the American virtues.

Via RS McCain. I have no quibbles with either of his additions.

Moe Lane

PS: I hear that World In Conflict absolutely rocks as a video game, though.

PPS: “WOLVERINES!!!!!”

What? I like awful, sometimes.
Crossposted at Moe Lane.

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COMMENTS

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  • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

    Looks like a reach to me in some cases. A conservative note here or there does not make a symphony one of ours.

    But Red Dawn? Absolutely belongs there. Come on. Movies don’t all have to be thought provokers; they’re allowed to be purely entertaining.

  • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

    It’s PS3 so it’s open to me…

  • EagleWatcher

    While they throw some stones at Joe McCarthy in subtle way they do portray the Soviet Communists as ruthless bad guys as it should be. And they do pay homage to good old fashioned marriage.

  • evanm

    Dude, that scene with the paratroopers dropping down and shooting up the schoolyard?!?!

  • NightTwister

    I and three others in the world liked it.

    The Postman.

    I agree with you about Red Dawn. But then, I also liked it, along with Starship Troopers and THX 1138,

  • EagleWatcher

    Just wondering if I should see it.

  • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens
  • HerbC

    I like the premise of vets having more control..
    granted, allowing only veterans, or those in the service
    the right to vote, and none other, is bogus… but perhaps
    2 or 1.5 votes for a vet..

  • JSobieski

    I mean seriously, the movie was made when the Peace Movement was protesting Reagan on 5 continents.

    Context is key to its inclusion on the list. This isn’t a WWII movie made 60 years after the war, this was a Cold War movie made during a time in the Cold War where lots of “both sides are wrong” movies were being made.

    I agree that without that context, the movie shouldn’t make the list. However, the context is a big deal.

  • JSobieski

    so anti-communist movies made in the 50s, 60s, and most of the 70s don’t count

  • JSobieski

    meanwhile Red Dawn was made during a contentious time when people were making movies like “The Day After” on prime time televison.

  • NightTwister

    1. An unexpected hero leads the people to fight for freedom.

    2. A triumph of personal character.

    3. The scenery is incredible (filmed in northeastern Washington State).

    4. It stars Kevin Costner (a personal favorite).

    5. Tom Petty as a town mayor. (Ok, this one may not be a plus).

    It still holds the record as the biggest money loser ever. I believe it cost over $90 million to make and only pulled in around $13 million.

  • NightTwister
  • JSobieski

    .

  • Swamp_Yankee

    Its un-American to not like Red Dawn.

    Starships Troopers was kind of fun, but it was liberal with its one world government and feminist messages

  • Vladimir

    What other movie portrays the Cubans as the Russian Foreign Legion? (Well, there’s Heartbreak Ridge, and no others I can think of.)

    What other movie takes on what would have happened if the Cold War hadn’t stayed cold?

    When the movie came out, the Soviets were still a plausible military threat.

    And when the movie came out, it was still plausible that American high school kids might spontaneously fight an invader.

    Great cinema, it’s not, but it’s a memorable movie.

  • Next93

    In the first sequence they have soviet soldiers in America killing American servicemen and stealing American “weapons”. Two minutes later one of the characters is complaining about how “paranoid” the current political climate is.

    Call me crazy, but I don’t think that it’s paranoid to be worried about soviet spies if you have proof that they’re in the country and stealing weapons technology (Rosenburgs).

    Then, of course, you have the whole subtext of the FBI using the red scare to hound ordinary citizens, because they counldn’t FIND any *real* soviet spies.

  • Next93

    Sorry, but that movie had a very distinct attitude that the military are either Nazis or brainwashed young idiots (or both).

    The climactic scene was a major break with the book, with the army brass unapologetically betraying the troops. There’s a strong art-deco visual aesthetic throughout that’s used to cast the military as fascists (Doogie Howser appears in what’s essentially an SS uniform in the last scene), and all political broadcasts strongly reminiscent of Nazi propoganda.

    On top of that, they removed nearly all of the discussion on duty, honor, and country that were so important to the book. They apparently needed to clear space in the script for some love scenes that never happened in the book (not that RAH would have complained about the mostly naked young ladies)

    Most Heinlein fans still can’t beleive that anyone would make a movie called “Starship Troopers” without powersuits.

    Fact is, no one has yet made a movie from a Heinlein book that managed to stay true to the vision and tone of the original. I’m personally hoping that no one else ever tries.

  • mikefisk

    Real-time strategy game set in an alternate future where the Cold War never ended, and military forces are starting to mobilize for an armed confrontation with the Soviets. Modern warfare on a grand scale.

    I bought the game for PC a while back… will thrash a lot of hardware, but looks gorgeous. The Collector’s Edition (which I have) comes not only with a really cool box (with stylized renditions of the Stars and Stripes on one side and a hammer and sickel on the reverse), but some History Channel DVDs on the Cold War as well as, I kid you not, a small piece of the Berlin Wall (with certificate of authenticity). If you can find this set on eBay, I highly recommend it. If not, the game is well worth playing, regardless of the system you get it for.

  • http://www.fredmaidment.com Fred Maidment

    The other half went to my high school: My brother and our old friend Mike.

  • http://www.fredmaidment.com Fred Maidment

    I mean, other than “Band of Brothers?”

  • longwalker

    are quite different from our customary idealization of veterans. At least in the book! The movie appears to have been written in crayon on butcher paper.

    A veteran to RAH was anyone who served, at some risk to his or her life, in the military services or the civilian equivalent.

    If you were physically unable to serve as a trooper or pilot, they would find something, equivalently dangerous, for you to do. That way, everyone who was willing to serve could serve. You earned the privilege of voting by placing yourself at risk – whether as a drop trooper or a volunteer in a medical lab.

    RAH wrote Starship Trooper to offer some ideas on what makes a “good citizen.” Not what makes a person a knowledgeable voter or officeholder but only on what would tend to make the citizen consider more than his or her own wants, needs or desires.

  • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens
  • http://moelane.com/ Moe Lane

    Coney Island.

  • http://moelane.com/ Moe Lane

    You were the victim of a nihilist cult that went around randomly kidnapping people to perform illicit mind control experiments on them. They also probably convinced you that there was more than one Highlander movie, and that they made sequels to Superman II.

  • http://moelane.com/ Moe Lane

    I’m merely noting that it was awful. :)

  • gardenstateeric

    are not “conservative”. It would be more accurate to call them 25 movies that really tick off liberals. I think Forest Gump is a clear example of a movie that is not at all conservative but that drives liberals crazy. It’s treatment of Vietnam, and of small town life and of the 60s protest movements wasn’t really a conservative view point, but it was a view point at odds with liberal orthodoxy.

    The one solid theme in Red Dawn was it’s pro-2nd amendment tack.

  • Snake45

    The Bridges at Toko-Ri. Very faithful to the book.

    A Bridge Too Far. Granted, it very much condenses the events but what’s there is accurate and descriptive. Every time I read the book, I want to watch the movie again, and every time I watch the movie, I want to read the book again. Each is excellent.

  • Next93

    I know it sounds stupid, but it’s true; that book changed my life.

    I read Starship Troopers in 1969; I was 12 and we’d just moved from a NASA neighborhood in central Florida to an inner-city area in upstate New York; I basically plunged directly from Stepford into the heart of the counter-culture. There was a constant drumbeat telling me that the ideals of my father’s generation were small-minded, wrong-headed, dangerous, and downright stupid. Reading that book, it felt like Robert Heinlein grabbed me by my lapels and made me understand that duty, honor, and country were the foundation of freedom.

    A lot of the kids I went through middle school with ended up making some really unfortunate life choices. If I hadn’t read that book, I would probably have been right there with them.

  • Next93

    Imagine if DW Griffin had released “Birth of a Nation” under the title “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, and you’d have a pretty good idea of how much the producers of the movie betrayed Heinlein’s vision.

  • Next93

    I had a friend in high school who was an Air Force dependent, and as a result I had the good fortune to watch the first of the Death Wish movies in a movie theater on an Air Force base.

    Wow, what an experience. Every time Chuck Bronson blew away some scumbag, everyone in the theater was on on thier feet cheering. Second amendment rights on steroids.

  • janis

    Pretty sure I saw the movie as a rental. And I agree with all your reasons for liking the movie. Well, except for #5, but you welshed on that one yourself. As for Kevin Costner, he ranks up there with Robert Duvall as one of my favorite actors. Costner was in Nashville recently with his music group whose-name-escapes-me-at -the-moment.

    Both Costner and Duvall are “real men” actors unlike, say, Johnny Depp and Sean Penn. (Ewww, I feel dirty even typing that last name.)

  • NightTwister

    It’s sort of a cult classic. I really never thought it would be possible to combine such a horrible plot, terrible acting, cheesy special effects, and unrelenting gore into a single movie. It’s everything that’s wrong with movies all wrapped into one. It’s the perfect train wreck, which makes it nearly impossible not to watch.

  • http://moelane.com/ Moe Lane

    It was going to be hard to put on the screen, though. I mean, the best lines in the book were the ones in the emergency proclamation.

  • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens
  • http://impudent.blognation.us/blog kyle8

    Movies are often a sign of their times. In the 1970′s, one of the things that made it such a craptastic decade, (and the early 1980′s) was the huge rise in crime.

    A lot of this was caused by liberal ideas of criminal justice, ie. the prison revolving door. As a consequence one of the most popular expressions in movies and literature at the time was the vigilante, or the cop who steps outside of the system.

    This eventually culminated in the fun, but cynical, Exterminator movies which came out about the same time as the Bernard Goetz incident.

    Shorty after that you had the three strikes rule and a general enforcement of criminal laws and suddenly there was less of an audience for such movies.

  • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

    It’s only a Zombie movie if you don’t look closely enough.

  • neum432

    NT