Red Dawn (1984)

Altitude Films have just released director John Milius' RED DAWN on 4K UHD and Blu-ray in both regular and steelbook editions.

"I'd be happy to go on directing Conan films until the day I die," said John Milius on the set of 1982's CONAN THE BARBARIAN, after which he never made another one. Instead, his next project was RED DAWN, based on a script called TEN SOLDIERS by future Kevin Costner associate Kevin Reynolds which was brought to the director because the producers felt he was the only man to depict a Russian invasion of America.

Which is what RED DAWN is all about. One bright morning Russian soldiers parachute into a small American town and start blazing away, rounding people up and sending all those who don't want to comply with the new communist regime to special camps. A group of teenagers (played by Patrick Swayze, Charlie Sheen, C Thomas Howell, Jennifer Grey and Lea Thompson among others) escape and form a resistance faction called the Wolverines. Aided by a downed airforce pilot (Powers Boothe) they start to strike back at their oppressors.

Easily construed as jingoistic tub-thumping nonsense, the real main problem with RED DAWN is its lack of focus. We never get to learn much about any of the characters and there's never a viewpoint to focus on. It's also never adequately explained why Russian forces would hit a small town first (or even that particular small town) nor why they would feel the need to have regular tank displays and marches through the middle of it. Are we expected to believe they would do this everywhere?

We are also rarely party to the rebellion's plans with the result that the second and third acts of the film become a rather meandering series of attacks on the Russians before the film staggers to its end. A year later, George P Cosmatos would make the jingoism more palatable (or slightly more ignorable) in his well-executed comic book action opus RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD PART II but here John Milius' desire to make a movie with a message rather comes undone with its own obsession to repeatedly show conflict to the point where it threatens to lose the attention. Perhaps that was part of the point.

"Forget politics, let's shoot some Russians" says Charlie Sheen, pretty much echoing what might be the philosophy of the film, in the archival 23 minute making of from 2007 that can be found on Altitude's second disc. The featurette also includes interview with Milius, Thompson, Swayze and Howell, all of whom turn up to varying degrees in the other extras which include 10 minutes on how they were trained to use the weapons, 10 minutes on the construction of the army (and where they got the tanks from) and 14 minutes on the locations (mainly Las Vegas New Mexico). There are no new extras.

John Milius' RED DAWN is out now from Altitude Films in double disc 4K UHD and Blu-ray sets (extras on the Blu-ray) and in a 4KUHD and Blu-ray steelbook