Red Dawn: A Legacy

You may have seen the camouflage from "Red Dawn" on small production run gear or a lot of cheaply made low effort apparel. We gave it a proper treatment by putting it on our signature Gorka K mountain suit.

The camo isn't real — it's completely fictional within the universe of Red Dawn (1984). It's become iconic for more reasons than just being an effective camo or even an eye-catching design. To understand why, we have to look at the film's significance in American Culture and the Second Amendment.

Red Dawn was made by an eccentric director with a shoestring budget of $17 million. But somehow this little movie has cemented itself into the pantheon of iconic Cold War action films. It punches in the same weight class as Rocky IV, holds you in suspense like the Hunt for Red October, and is as inspirational as the Miracle on Ice.

Now we can’t get too far here without addressing the reaction to Red Dawn when it first hit theaters. There’s no doubt about it; this is a violent movie. 

The protagonists are practically child soldiers, civilians are routinely executed on screen, and absolutely nobody has plot armor. The theatrical release is actually toned down in comparison to the original screenplay - early cuts were fairly brutal and even showed the use of chemical weapons; you can still read it online.

It would have easily landed the film an ‘R’ rating. 

Instead, significant portions of the film were re-worked so that the theatrical cut of Red Dawn could be the first PG-13 movie in America, after “Indiana Jones & the Temple of Doom” and “Gremlins” made parents force the Motion Picture Association of America to create the rating in the first place.

Still, Red Dawn’s toned-down rating from ‘R’ spurred on the National Coalition on Television Violence and Guinness Book of Records to deem Red Dawn the most violent film ever made. This was definitely an exaggeration even by 1980s standards.

But it was an understandable reaction to Red Dawn’s unvarnished depiction of Americans suffering under a foreign occupation. Exposing young audiences and sheltered American families to the realities of war was arguably the point of Red Dawn. 

In 1984, there were roughly 61 thousand total nuclear warheads between the US and the Soviet Union, plenty to obliterate society as we know it. The dawn of the 80s was in many ways ‘Peak’ Cold War.

Just one year prior to Red Dawn’s release, 100M Americans (just under half of the US’s population) were captivated by a similarly shocking TV film titled “The Day After.”

This 126-minute movie was an unflinching depiction of exactly what would transpire if mutually assured destruction happened — including graphic, realistic depictions of nuclear holocaust. The Day After moved President Ronald Reagan so much he noted in his journal that it was “very effective and left me greatly depressed.”

Ultimately many historians credit the film with changing Regan’s mind on nuclear policy, leading directly to the reduction of the US and Soviet nuclear arsenals.

Red Dawn had the same kind of sobering effect on many Americans. Although we can’t credit it with shifting foreign policy, both Nancy and Ronald Regan watched the film and said they enjoyed it. Probably because it’s better than all of the Ronald Reagan movies combined.

So why is Red Dawn so dismissed by modern film critics and the dreaded “Modern Audiences”? The main argument is something like this: There’s NO way America could ever be invaded by a foreign power, so why present a farfetched story like soviets popping up in our backyards with PKMs and shredding up our high schools?

The reality is that this sort of thing did actually happen for decades. Just not to Americans. 

A “Red Dawn” scenario, including all the violence and horrific atrocities, routinely happened in areas annexed by the USSR. In fact, most Soviet satellite states were just thinly veiled military occupations which brutally installed communism on unwilling populations. 

To name a few examples: Ukraine, Poland, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Poland AGAIN, Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia all at once, Manchuria, Czechoslovakia, and lastly the one that was actually happening while the film was in theaters, Afghanistan. 

The idea that modern audiences can dismiss the prospect of violence in mainland USA is a testament to the exceptional safety and prosperity enjoyed by Americans. It's safe to say we take our safety for granted, regardless of your feelings on our military budget or which politician is at the helm today.

Looking at the film’s opening scene, there's little exposition before the Soviet surprise-invasion of Calumet, a small mining town in Colorado. It puts you in the same seat as the citizens of that town, as the status quo of daily American life is shattered right before your eyes. The soviets weren’t known for their warnings to places they were about to annex.

We think that premise alone is much more plausible and relatable than the invasion of a massive key city like New York or Los Angeles, as seems to be the setting for many “invasion” films. From a literary perspective, Godzilla, Battle: Los Angeles, Independence Day, Ender’s Game, and even Marvel’s The Avengers are all representative of some foreign force invading a country much in the same way as Red Dawn. 

But instead of giant monsters or aliens, it's something much scarier and less human —Communists. Probably the second most jarring thing for the sacred “modern audiences” is the protagonists themselves. We’re already talking about a joint Soviet-Cuban assault into rural Colorado, but a bunch of high schoolers taking up arms and leading the resistance? Certainly that’s far fetched..

But as outlandish as this may seem to American audiences, the ages of Calumet’s high schoolers are par for the course for modern insurgencies, and arguably the norm for most of human history.

In fact, most of the soldiers who fought America’s revolutionary war were in their late teens and early 20s. From the perspective of the plot, thrusting a bunch of kids into a literal war scenario also has a purpose.

Bear with us as we whip out some literary analysis.

Typically, stories feature teenage protagonists for one reason. They are our near future. They’re the most important cohort of Americans — they pave the way for cultural progress, they’re going to be voters, leaders, educators, workers and innovators before you know it.

Most teenagers have a natural rebellious nature towards adult authority. Acts of rebellion against their parents, teachers, and this domination of the cultural climate is ultimately what moves culture forward.

Directing youthful rebellion and vitality into social renewal is one of the key responsibilities of any healthy society. And a huge part of that is passing on the values that form the bedrock of any sovereign nation.

Red Dawn could be viewed as an attempt to connect with the young Americans of the 80s - a generation that didn’t grow up with World Wars, economic turmoil, or even the draft.

How do you communicate the perils of communism and tyrannical government to kids who have never experienced serious hardship or seen violence firsthand? A literal youth-led rebellion is a genius narrative vehicle to accomplish this.

And to the credit of Red Dawn’s directors, this is REALLY effective because the young men and women of Calumet High are given real agency and real life or death decisions over the course of the film.

By hiding the call to responsibility and adulthood inside a sort of “adventure”, Red Dawn accomplishes something similar to what Top Gun did for military recruitment. Mainly, Top Gun crafted an inspiring story showing how literal Mavericks can use their energy for the good of their country and community.

And we all know Top Gun worked. Recruitment numbers for naval aviators skyrocketed.

Towards teens and young adults, Red Dawn shows just what being an American means. We don’t wait for help to arrive. We spring into action and help each other in the name of freedom for all, just as our founding fathers did.

Like the people of our nation’s past, we fight even when we’re backed against a wall, and we fight even when it means giving our own life. This message is reinforced by the adults in the film, who support and encourage the Wolverines when they are scared and uncertain.

To drive home the point, many adult characters bravely face their own deaths unbroken by brutal repression. The downed pilot, Lt. Col. Tanner sacrifices himself bravely in battle, and of course there’s that harrowing mass-execution conducted by the Soviets. That scene in particular is the kind of thing that really was in the playbook of communist regimes.
 
Take the fall of the Berlin Wall for example — It’s widely considered a triumph of peaceful protest, but East Germany was actively mobilizing soldiers for mass executions and violent reprisal against protesters. Thousands of deaths were only avoided by the grace of god and dysfunctional Soviet bureaucracy. 

And that was AFTER this film hit theaters.

Concealing the brutal realities of Marxism, Leninism, and Communism was the primary goal of well-funded and extremely successful soviet-backed propaganda efforts in the United States.

Conversely, Red Dawn as a film has been called American propaganda by many critics, and we’re not exactly denying that it is. But not all propaganda is inherently bad.

For all its faults, Red Dawn clearly articulates America’s foundational values. It absolutely nails the responsibility of the individual to uphold free society and underlines the reality that American prosperity and safety is in fact built on generations of sacrifice.

In a time where the threat of communism felt remote and unimaginable to a generation of young Americans, Red Dawn brought a global struggle for a free world home to our living rooms. It gave Americans a healthy, positive ideal to align with and strengthened our bonds with our allies too.

But there’s a problem with freedom, you can’t just give people a few rights and call it a day. Without the ability to violently oppose tyranny, no society is truly free.

It would be easy for it to end at violently resisting the Soviets, but what really sets this film apart is its specific, whole-hearted endorsement of the second amendment. The film makes a strong case for gun ownership right away as the boys scramble to arm themselves when no police or military show up to save the day.

It should come as no surprise that the director, John Milius, is a certified “gun guy” who agreed to direct Red Dawn for 1.25 million dollars… and a gun of his choice. 

But we think it’s safe to say he wasn’t just a gun collecting fudd, he’s a true believer in 2A. Just look at the plot of the film!

Red Dawn puts the 2nd amendment in the very context it was originally written for and does such a good job making the case for civilian gun ownership that it even appeals to “non-gun” people.

But Milius doesn’t stop there. Lots of Hollywood films show regular Americans with guns in a positive light, but to our knowledge Red Dawn is the only film to explicitly challenge the underlying legal framework of gun control. 

One scene in Red Dawn underlines that most of all. One of the main antagonists, Colonel Ernesto Bella, tells Cuban forces to retrieve “form 4473”. If you own a gun you know exactly what this is. 

Almost every time you purchase a firearm in the USA from a gun shop, all of your personal information down to your social security number, how much you weigh, and whether or not you enjoy mary jane & juana is put on the super official B-AFT-E Firearms Transaction Record 4473. 

The soviet forces in the film take advantage of these government mandated transaction records to hunt down and kill gun owners that could rise up as a guerilla fighting force, and of course, confiscate their firearms.

The 4473 was introduced just 15 years before the film 1968, and following the release of Red Dawn, an even more anti-gun Gun Control Act (GCA) would be passed in ‘86. You know, the one that did not in fact protect firearms owners AT ALL, created a national gun registry, and criminalized thousands of law-abiding gun owners?

This scene in the film is perhaps the most plausible part of the whole story. Confiscation is part of the playbook of any oppressive occupying force or domestic tyrannical government. A corrupt group of people could find out exactly where you live, what guns you have, and even what you look like, should they simply seize these documents. 

Critics apparently do not understand the implications or haven’t read a single history book wherein an evil regime confiscates or bans the means of self-protection from its people. 

This film did for gun ownership what Top Gun did for naval aviation. With the same amount of “HELL YEAH”. We personally know several gun companies that were founded because this film inspired its people to start buying, making & selling firearms.

And a big reason this messaging worked, is that the Director and everyone involved in the film cared about the second amendment and genuinely liked guns & military hardware. 

They did everything they could to make the soviet invasion feel authentic. But they had to be crafty — sourcing true Russian/soviet equipment was nigh impossible in the middle of the cold war.

Vehicles were creatively acquired from countries nearby the Soviet Union or replicated with varying degrees of success. A “DShK” in the film is just an m60 with a modified grip and a hilariously large muzzle brake. And don’t even get the AK autists started on the amount of Valmets and wacky kit guns on screen.

But the biggest creative leap in the prop department is also the piece of gear the film is best known for. The camo. Featured on the bad guys in the film from the start and eventually looted by the Wolverines, “Red Dawn” camo is totally fictional. 

But the propmasters did an excellent job at making it look like it was designed by Soviets. It draws influences from the late WWII German splinter camo with its “rain” pattern present, combines it with a touch of Russian Berezka, and the result actually works well as a real camo in the wintertime.
 
In fact, ‘Red Dawn Camo’ was reused in Rambo III and “The 4th War” on soviet NPCs, since it was so convincing. To our knowledge, sadly, most of the real movie costumes have been totally destroyed. 

And sadly, a lot of the homages to the real deal, are, frankly, Crapola. The internet is awash with the kind of thing that just gets directly printed on t-shirts and workout shorts, high quality uniforms using “red dawn” camo are scarce.

So that’s where our Gorka comes in — It’s patterned off a real soviet military mountain suit but only ours has massive improvements in fit and function. For over half a decade it’s been the single biggest “must have” item on our site, so of course we had to give it the full Red Dawn treatment.

We can relate to Director John Milius quite a bit when it comes to putting that much passion into getting things right. Outside of Red Dawn, his writing had a huge influence on film. He is credited for lines like “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” from Apocalypse Now AND Dirty Harry’s famous line “Go ahead, Make my day” from Sudden Impact.

Milius also wrote for the game “Homefront”, which has a very similar scenario to Red Dawn, except with a North Korean invasion instead. It unfortunately did not go on to be a very popular video game.

There was, however, one game that is arguably one of the most popular of all time, that did in fact do “Red Dawn” right.

In 2009, Call of Duty Modern Warfare II exploded onto the scene and defined the absolute gold standard for military shooter games. The game revolves around global tensions boiling over, leading to a carbon-copy “Red Dawn” Scenario where Russians invade the United States by air — suspiciously familiar. The invasion takes place in a chapter called “Wolverines!”, an obvious homage to Red Dawn.

In the mission, the player or should I say “RAMIREZ!” is tasked with escorting a VIP and of course PROTECTING BURGER TOWN during a surprise Russian invasion in suburban America.  Again, we’re back to that alternate history “Unlikely” Scenario. The whole story from this part of the game and onward is a massive love letter to the film, just from a military and special forces perspective.

It inadvertently introduced us lowly zoomers to Red Dawn with the title of the mission too. Red Dawn and Call of Duty MWII both show teens and young adults that America is about turning our greatest perils as a nation into our finest hours.

And that’s the thing — the stories and aesthetics have had an enormous effect. Red Dawn might have been the reason many people got into guns, survival skills, or being a prepared citizen in the first place.  And like we said earlier, it contextualized just how important the 2nd amendment is when used for its true purpose.

So how the heck is a violent movie where a group of high schoolers slowly gets killed off by a pointless war even remotely that positive about America?

And that's a fair point — this movie doesn’t have a traditional happy ending. You don’t even get the satisfaction of seeing “liberation” in the end. The ending instead causes a moment of pause and introspection in the audience. The final scene shows “Partisan Rock”. 

It looks like a monument you’d see commemorating veterans of the civil war. In fact, the phrase on the rock, “This nation shall not perish from the earth” is a direct quote from the Gettysburg Address.

The fragility of our nation’s unity was something far removed from cushy 1980s American society. 

What this scene does is connect the viewers both young and old to the unthinkable suffering that people went through throughout our history, as if it just happened yesterday. 

Watching this as a kid or young adult, it certainly makes you think, “Could I too be called upon someday to protect the nation? How would I deal with it?”

With all of that in mind we struggle to see how Red Dawn could be construed as negative propaganda. It’s incredibly important to show films like these to as many people as possible and have these difficult conversations about war and sacrifice.

And most importantly none of those broader themes make this any less of a good movie from a cinematic point of view, we think it’s phenomenal in that regard too.

But there’s one more thing we’d like to close this off with. 

In the latter portion of the film, the Cuban Colonel Ernesto Bella is completely disillusioned. He thinks about how backwards the war was — because he too was once a rebel spearheading a revolution, fighting the good fight for what he thought was “Freedom”.

The Colonel knows how horrible of a thing that he’s doing to the citizens of Calumet, and also how fruitless it was to hunt down a small group of guerilla fighters. His side would never truly win over the spirit of the people they were invading, just as the USSR never truly did anywhere else.

The war was a lost cause from the second the paratroopers touched down. Communism, or any other ideology can’t just be forced on people in the name of the “greater good” without pushback from those who believe in freedom for all.

As it’s been said, “Every war movie is an anti-war movie”. So why did we sit down and make this? It’s a lot different from our typical content here on KommandoStore.

We truly love red dawn. It inspires many of us to do what we do. We think movies and art are just as much of a cornerstone of the cold war as the military operations that took place, and it’s important to talk about them just like we do with history.