Don’t ever let anybody tell you that “Red Dawn” isn’t one of the greatest movies ever made.
I got into a bit of a testy exchange this morning about where “Red Dawn” ranked among the best films in cinema history. Was it a great war movie, a great B-film that’s a war movie, not a deep film or an outstanding piece of cinematic history?
You can go ahead and mark me down as a firm believer that it’s one of the best war movies — one of the best overall movies — we’ve ever seen.
Don’t feed me this garbage about character arc, development, dialogue or anything else. This movie was about killing communists, defending freedom, fighting to defend your friends, killing bad guys to save your city and country and being overall badasses.
What’s not to love about any of that? Save your high-class cinema for somebody who doesn’t know how to properly oil an AR-15 and isn’t capable of performing a tactical reload of their main weapon under pressure. They can enjoy their caviar and fur coats. I’ll stick with my Miller Lite and custom-made AR-15. Something tells me that I’m going to be substantially better off in the event of a Russian invasion.
And I don’t want to be friends with anybody who hasn’t at least once in their life been popping soda cans and envisioned them to be paratroopers falling from the skies. I want to be friends with the people ready to rush out with ammo cans as we tear off into the mountains to begin the fights.
I give “Red Dawn” a solid 10/10.*
*We’re not going to talk about that ridiculous remake where starving North Koreans take over America. We would win that war in a day.