Along with Top Gun, Red Dawn's a fascinatingly implausible 80's propaganda piece that alternates between unintentional comedy and Republican masturbation fantasy. Whereas Top Gun concerns itself with sleek technological whizbang and individualism, this film is all about grubby communal survivalism. At the end of the day you can't take a movie in which Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen take on the Red Army singlehandedly too seriously, insofar as being aware that the director and Sarah Palin did.

Preposterous, but well-crafted and enjoyable.

What can I say? I love over the top movies that are otherwise fucking shit if one were too be critical but totally awesome if you just plain don't give a shit.

AVENGE ME!!!!! AVEEENGE MEEEE!!!

Take that ya dirty commies!

It's fun to laugh at just how precisely John Milius is like Walter Sobchak.

Wolveriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiines!!!!!!

Painfully right-wing.

Red-neck Dawn

The key to enjoying this movie is accepting that a group of teenagers can successfully evade and hold off the combined military might of both the Russians and Cubans. Get past that, and you'll probably enjoy yourself!

Contemptible fable from right-wing idealogue Milius.

I like the premise, and the action is quite good in a classic 80s sort of way. However there's something that just prevents me from really getting into it... probably something to do with the hokey dialog or predictable melodrama.

WOLVERINES! It's so hard to rank movies like this. I know for a fact it's not a good movie. I'm not going to debate the cinematic merits of it with anyone. But I will be damned if I don't enjoy the hell out of this movie every time I watch it. It's goofy 80's cheesy action fun. Ignore the fact that the kids never miss with a bullet and forget about the incredibly melodramatic dialogue. Just give it a chance and you may just have a good time.

To describe this film as the work of right-wing fantasists would be an insult to right-wing fantasists everywhere. It is not merely mediocre: nearly every scene shows that those responsible felt committed to presenting a kind of "powerful nightmare," in order to reawaken some sort of masculine, militaristic American will which they perceived as having been dangerously weakened over the course of the 20th century. The result is literally unbelievable.

Wolverines! A little longer than it needed to be, but a classic cold war story that bears watching.

words are useless!

So sincerely fascist, it's hysterical. Reprehensible and basically terrible, but hysterical.

Ultra-reactionary flag-wavery that makes Top Gun look like Battleship Potemkin both in terms of ideology and film-making. But certainly good for a laugh or ten for lines like "Well, when you grow up... then you'll know these things, Danny. Now get up here and piss in the radiator" and the continuing conundrum of "why the hell are the Russians, Cubans and Nicaraguans so hell-bent on defending a small town in the Rockies, and how can they suck so badly at it if they took LA within a few hours?"

A gung-ho action flick that asks you to take it seriously. Don't! On top of that, It's a bore.

Hysterical but oddly watchable Reagan era gun porn. The tale of a Soviet invasion of the U.S. piles improbability on top of improbability; the harder it tries to be serious, the funnier it gets. The action sequences are oddly static and sterile, hindered in no small part by an apparently meager budget. "AVENNNNGE ME!!!"

As an action film, it's marginal. As a serious drama it's negligible. As a cheesy, gung-ho piece of Reaganist patriotic propaganda, it's fucking Citizen Kane. This movie's crap, but for some weird unexplainable reason, it it's on, I wind up watching it.

who the fuck recommended me this?? i'm going to remember one day, and cut you out of my life forever.

Just when this movie couldn't possibly get any better, Powers Boothe falls from the sky. You know me, John Milius. You know me well.

Not great, but still an iconic 80s film that deserves to be recognised.

Unintentionally hilarious.