Red Dawn Revamped Ratings with Russian Fears

It’s certainly not unusual for a movie to strike a nerve pertaining to current events. It’s much rarer for that movie to sit squarely at the intersection of two social concerns. Forty years ago, John Milius’s Red Dawn opened with a brand-new film rating that had suddenly developed that year after controversy over violence in summer releases. Apart from the violence, its themes and subject matter plugged directly into American anxiety about the ongoing Cold War. Here’s how Milius invaded the cultural conversation.

Earlier in 1984, the releases of two films spurred outcry over the level of violence depicted. Both films carried the PG (Parental Guidance) rating, and both happened to be produced by Steven Spielberg. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (which Spielberg also directed) was released on May 23, and Gremlins (directed by Joe Dante) hit screens on June 8. While Temple of Doom wasn’t necessarily more violent than its 1981 predecessor, Raiders of the Lost Ark, which featured Nazis melting and getting diced by airplane propellers (albeit off-screen), Temple of Doom provoked more notice with a gross-out dinner scene and the tendency of main bad guy Mola Ram to pull the still-beating hearts out of sacrificial victims. The main complaints about Gremlins centered on the (admittedly awesome) scene in which Mrs. Peltzer (Frances Lee McCain) wipes out a group of the little fiends using kitchen appliances; however, Kate’s (Phoebe Cates) monologue on why she didn’t celebrate Christmas (because her father tried to surprise the family dressed as Santa, got stuck in the chimney, and died) also infuriated some parents.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom trailer (Uploaded to YouTube by Paramount Movies)

Perhaps it was because he was old enough to recall the Congressional hearings on comic books in 1954 or simply because he was a student of movie history and a savvy filmmaker, but Spielberg decided to intervene before the complaints spiraled into any kind of government action. Spielberg suggested that the then-MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) create a new rating between PG and R. That rating would be PG-13 (Parents Strongly Cautioned – Some material may be inappropriate for children under 13). The idea was that the 13 put the onus on the parents; with a little more information that a PG-13 film would be a little more intense, parents would have a slightly easier time deciding whether or not to take the kids.

It was Spielberg’s old pal John Milius who would release the first film to get the new rating. The movie was Red Dawn, a vision of what would happen if an alliance of the Soviet Union, Central American nations, and members of the Warsaw Pact invaded the United States. It arrived when the culture was in a jumble of Cold War fears: This particularly  tense time in world history saw three different Soviet leaders between 1982 and 1984 and the U.S.S.R.’s downing of a Korean passenger plane in 1983.

The original Red Dawn trailer (Uploaded to YouTube by Amazon MGM Studios)

Red Dawn originated with a screenplay called Ten Soldiers by Kevin Reynolds. Reynolds, who would later direct Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and 2002’s The Count of Monte Cristo, among others, eventually landed the script at MGM. The MGM board brought Milius in as director. Milius had an avid fan in one board member in particular: General Alexander Haig. Haig had been chief of staff for both Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford and served as secretary of state under Ronald Reagan in 1981 and 1982. Haig had a keen interest in the military aspects of the story and helped Milius formulate what that kind of invasion might look like. Reynolds’s original conception was that the film was more of an antiwar statement; in fact, that was Milius’s intention as well. But the involvement of Haig and the heavy emphasis on action altered the focus of the movie, making it more appealing to viewers caught up in the “us vs. them” of the era.

In filling out the young actors who make up the resistance fighters known as “The Wolverines,” the filmmakers leaned on a number of actors who were, as Lea Thompson put it in the 2024 documentary, Brats, “Brat Pack adjacent.” Patrick Swayze,  C. Thomas Howell, and Darren Dalton had appeared together in the Brat Pack ur-text, The Outsiders. The brother of their Outsiders co-star Emilio Estevez, Charlie Sheen, joined the film as the brother of Swayze’s character. Brad Savage (best known for his terrifying scene as Danny Glick in TV’s original Salem’s Lot mini-series) joined the cast as well. Lea Thompson, who had appeared with Outsiders co-star Tom Cruise in All the Right Moves, Jennifer Grey (in her second film), and Doug Toby rounded out the group. The adult actors were an impressive lot, featuring the likes of Powers Boothe, Ron O’Neal (Superfly himself), Harry Dean Stanton, Lane Smith, Pepe Serna, and Ben Johnson.

Whether it was the young cast, the curiosity about the notion of an invaded America, or the promise of action from the director of Conan the Barbarian, the film with the odd new rating had a solid landing. It was #20 in the year-end box office in one of the most successful years in the history of American movies. Some critics were unkind, mainly due to perceptions of jingoism, but it went over well with audiences and had a strong second life on home video and premium and cable channels. The film has also reverberated through references in other films, TV shows, and video games; a (poorly received) remake was made in 2012.

The Red Dawn remake trailer (Uploaded to YouTube by Amazon MGM Studios)

It’s not often that a film drops into the middle of two completely different cultural conversations, but Red Dawn managed to do it. Viewed apart from either issue as an action film, it continues to hold up and pulls no punches with the fates of its young cast. But the most poignant legacy of the film surfaced nearly 40 years later: During Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine, it wasn’t unusual to see destroyed Russian armored vehicles tagged in spray paint with the same word that the film’s young heroes used on Soviet tanks: Wolverines.