This film has a 53% Rotten rate on Rotten Tomatoes.
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rregan-3 — 9 years ago(June 05, 2016 12:53 PM)
This thread is full of craziness. It's the same beep with Lone Survivor and American Sniper. As long as America looks like some immortal warrior of righteousness, people will put up with crappy acting and writing. How heroic America is portrayed as no bearing on how much I like or disklike this movie.
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Gabe1972 — 9 years ago(July 04, 2016 12:40 AM)
For sure. I think it's a pretty good movie, although when you read posts by people that didn't live through that time, you'd think the movie is awful. They just don't get it, envisioning it as some elitist nonsense. I love people that comment on things they clearly have no idea about.
I drank what? -
ajhart-60432 — 9 years ago(August 21, 2016 11:52 AM)
The only real complaint I have about the film is how most of the main characters are killed off.
You can play it out two different ways: this rag-tag group of kids bands together and successfully beats back a Soviet invasion until they get backup from the Green Berets (as mentioned in the film), or they get slaughtered after a few successful insurgent attacks.
I had no serious qualms about the scene where Powers Boothe's character and one of the Wolverines are killed on the tanks. You obviously have to remind the audience that there are serious stakes involved. But then everyone starts to die and whatever attachment the audience has developed towards the characters is ruined.
The David versus Goliath story structure is a very common one in fiction, but David has to win. Otherwise, you're just left with an empty feeling at the end. I've read that the director wanted to show the futility of war, but to shoehorn that sentiment into this film was a mistake. The Wolverines didn't need to singlehandedly defeat the Soviets, but they should have survived long enough to see reinforcements come and finish the job. -
ficoce — 9 years ago(September 20, 2016 07:46 PM)
This wasn't David vs. Goliath. I saw this movie about '84, after returning from Grenada fighting Cubans and watching soviet advisors leave on a little fishing boat. The movie was powerful to me at the time. I'd also spent time in the middle east where I saw the results of thousands of years of war, and yep, war is futile. This movie was never meant to follow a common story line, plenty of John Wayne movies for that.
It's still relevant today. I spent a few days in Tel Aviv in '83, one of which was their independence day. A terrorist bomb went off in the city and another in Jerusalem. The people were treating it like we would a major fire in the states, with a little concern. I was more than a little freaked out, because I'd never been in a city where this kind of thing went down. I remember thinking to myself that people back home will flip out when they hear about this. Of course they didn't - it's one of those things where you have to be there, and the US was still innocent. Flash forward to 2016? After killing Hussein, Gaddafi, and Bin Laden - people understand my story, because we are there.
It's why people are still talking about
Red Dawn. -
wesperkins — 9 years ago(October 22, 2016 04:04 PM)
I think people under 35 simply can not understand the atmosphere when this movie was released. It was very powerful then. But if you were not alive during that period it's hard to comprehend what it meant.