What RED DAWN’s Success Taught This Director About Hollywood

Published: December 4, 2024

What RED DAWN’s Success Taught This Director About Hollywood

Movieguide® Contributor

The patriotic message of RED DAWN has been admired by many for the last 40 years, and its director’s daughter is now sharing what the movie taught her dad and the family.

“Amanda Milius, the daughter of the film’s director, spoke to Fox News Digital about the film’s 40th anniversary, its legacy, and what the movie revealed to her dad,” Fox News reported Nov. 30. “Released in 1984, RED DAWN told the story of the Soviet Union invading America and fighting a conventional land battle within the USA. It starred some of the most popular actors of the day and has gone on to be regarded as a cultural touchstone of the Cold War era.”

While it was a hit with audiences, it wasn’t so popular with Hollywood.

“The lesson that he [John Milius] told myself and my brothers…was Hollywood says all they care about is if the thing makes money, like they’ll, you know, support it,” Amanda said. “Not true. That movie made a great deal of money and they were like, ‘You’re never getting your hands on a camera again until you calm down.’”

“A lot of people claim that RED DAWN is the reason that he never got to really finish his career in as prolific of a way as he should have because of its politics…It was not the kind of movie that Hollywood was interested in putting out at that moment,” she expressed.

Amanda believes the movie impacted many because it points to a collective responsibility.

There’s a scene where Patrick Swayze’s character says why the younger generation is defending America when they have little chance of success. “Because we live here,” he says.

“That [scene] means, ‘We have to do this. We have to take care of the country…This is our responsibility,'” Amanda said. “It’s like this very American idea of, I’m going to go and I just know in my bones that if somebody were to invade my land, I would go and protect it in whatever way I could with my high school friends in a truck.”

Her father was a board member of the National Rifle Association. In one scene in the movie, the Soviets use gun registration records to confiscate weapons.

“I think RED DAWN is the movie where he got to do the most of what he wanted without interference because there’s so many things that he gets away with in that movie that you could never do today. I mean, just never,” she said.

She says the scene is her father’s caution to “watch out for government overreach” and added, “I think most people love that scene. I love it. I think it was, you know, pretty on point.”

Former Secretary of State to Ronald Reagan Al Haig said the movie “captures the stresses of patriotism, the emotions of love and, above all, the futility of war.”

Hollywood critic Roger Ebert criticized: “I think this movie is corrupt from beginning to end. And one of the problems I had with it is that it makes a very definite political statement…There was a whole right-wing ideology that the picture itself doesn’t deserve.”

But Hollywood has no problem with movies that have a whole left-wing ideology.

“Can we even imagine a movie that is so left-wing Hollywood would have a problem with it? I mean, I can’t even think of a movie that would be too left-wing for Hollywood,” Amanda said.

She added, “That’s exactly what Hollywood thought of the whole thing. Way too patriotic.”

Foreign Policy wrote, “Neither the adulation on the right nor a critical analysis by the left truly does RED DAWN justice or comprehend its core message: that those under occupation have the right to fight back. This can be an uncomfortable message for Americans to swallow. Forty years after the film’s release, it has proved to be the Americans who went around the world as invading armies faced at times by teenagers who took arms in defense of their homes. Many don’t hear or understand the question, but Red Dawn continues to ask Americans: How would you like it if somebody did that to you?”

The Washington Examiner upheld the movie as a “misunderstood masterpiece.”

“Both sides missed the point of the RED DAWN,” The Washington Examiner said. “It is ultimately an anti-war film and all the more powerful because it makes its points subtly rather than blaring them out from the first scenes like the anti-Vietnam films of the 1970s and ’80s.”

In 2012, Dan Bradley directed a remake of RED DAWN, which earned a Teddy Bear Award®. In it, the Chinese are changed to North Koreans.

Amanda said she’s “under direct orders” not to view it. “None of us have even paid a dime to even glance at a frame of it.”

Her father also directed CONAN THE BARBARIAN and co-wrote APOCOLYPSE NOW.

In 2010, he had a stroke and “can’t speak as well as he used to,” Amanda informed Fox News. “He’s doing well…He is doing his thing. He is stable, happy.”