The ‘80s in 40: ‘Red Dawn’ (August 1984)

The ‘80s in 40 revisits the decade of the 1980s choosing four movies a year, one from each quarter. This entry covers the third quarter of 1984.

On August 10, 1984, the American men’s basketball team, which included future NBA stars Chris Mullin, Patrick Ewing, and Michael Jordan, easily beat Spain to win the gold medal at the 1984 Olympics; Ray Parker Jr.’s Ghostbusters theme topped the charts; and the Soviet Union seized large portions of the United States by dropping paratroopers and other invasion forces deep into the nation’s heartland following a limited nuclear engagement.

True, one of those events only happened in movie theaters. (Hint: it’s the last one.) But even if Red Dawn, the John Milius-directed action movie that brought that scenario to life, wasn’t directly ripped from the headlines, the film reflected a moment of escalating Cold War tensions as surely as The Day After and Testament, two harrowing depictions of nuclear war that had debuted the previous year. Was it morning in America, as Ronald Reagan’s reelection campaign claimed, or three minutes to midnight, as the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock stubbornly insisted?

What if you split the difference? The version of Red Dawn that debuted in August 1984 depicted a doomsday that doubled as a recruitment ad via a story that pitted the combined might of Soviet and leftist Latin American military powers against a band of scrappy teenage guerillas from small-town Colorado. Sure, the immediate future might look dim, but in the end, America’s God-given right to kick ass would prevail. As the Olympics spectators liked to say: U.S.A.! U.S.A.!