Red Dawn (1984)
John Milius stands as a singular figure among the first generation of film school brats that he calls friends and peers. He lacked Coppola’s love of family and loyalty, Spielberg’s and Lucas’s populism and Scorcese’s Catholic introspection. What he had instead was a Nietzschean sense of the world as a cold and hellish place where only the strong survive. He contributed wonderful bits to his friends’ films:
The Indianapolis Speech in “Jaws,” “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” to “Apocalypse Now,” and his own “Conan the Barbarian” was a great bit of pulpy fun that unleashed Arnold on the world. In “Red Dawn,” he combined Cold War paranoia with a libertarian wet dream to tell the story of high-school kids that become the insurgency in a Soviet-occupied U.S.A. The film is risible on almost every level, and features a ridiculous number of future ‘80s stars in its cast, but it’s hard to deny as trashy fun.
