The night before last, as the story of the evolving invasion of Ukraine spread across the “News scape,” I decided that I had to watch Red Dawn – a 1984 war movie starring Patrick Swazey and Charlie Sheen among others. I’ve seen this flick at least four times; the last of those was during a visit to Estes Park, Colorado while we were hole up in a one-bedroom cabin during a snowfall – very appropriate for a movie much of which is set in the Colorado Rockies during the winter months.
There is 2012 rendering of the same story, but it has North Koreans invading America rather than Russians, if I recall correctly. The former rendering is more germane to our current world situation since it has Russia as the aggressor responding to a Ukrainian crop failure in the setting of the dissolution of NATO. Does any of this sound familiar? It’s just fiction, of course; the current situation in Ukraine (as was America in Red Dawn) is not. The story is about an American insurgency – or at least a tiny part of that effort, led by teens who adopt the moniker of their high school mascot. They are Wolverines.
Like present-day Ukrainians, the Wolverines mount a retaliatory insurgency against the invaders. Most die, but they keep up the fight to the last man. Mothers, Fathers, Sisters, and Brothers all fall to a vastly superior invading force. That’s the only part of the fiction that rings true, and it always causes me to choke up, I must admit.
The score to this movie was written by Basil Poledouris whose film scores include epics such as Conan the Barbarian, Starship Troopers, Red Oktober, and many other major films. For this flick, he definitely wrote a heroic martial theme.
So, here I am, two days after watching Red Dawn, listening to the news, and pondering the images of Russian rockets striking civilian areas in Kiev, Kharkiv, and smaller but strategically important Ukrainian cities. Sigh.
Shit, we are such a fucked-up species.