Thread not closed?? OK, posting.
I remember when I first saw Red Dawn in theaters in the '80s, as with every teenage male in the theater, I thought "go wolverines, kill those invader scum." It was so clear to me how the local boys were the good guy rebels and the soviets were the evil invader scum and deserved to die gruesomely.
The movie seemed so utterly improbable to me, and I guess it was, the soviets never could have taken us in conventional war, so Red Dawn existed in a parallel universe to our own, and I thought nothing like it could ever happen in this world.
Now when I watch it, it's all changed, done a complete 180. In my current mindset, the wolverines now remind me of Iraqi insurgents, and the soviets have become our soldiers in The Coalition of the Willing. I still want to cheer for the wolverines, but then I think, "they're the insurgents, planting IED's, hiding out and conducting ambushes." I am forced to wonder what a typical Iraqi would have to say after viewing this film.
Also, the film has moved from the realm of the impossible to the realm of the commonplace, although the roles are reversed in-a-mirror-darkly style. We are the invaders now, and when I watch Red Dawn I see the soviets a little differently. My nephew is the Army National Guard and has served in Iraq twice, and I can't help but see a little of him in the soviet soldiers being blown up by the wolverines.
The parallels between Red Dawn and the Iraq war are not perfect (example: we don't mass-execute the locals as was done in Red Dawn) and under close scrutiny some of it doesn't correspond, but the similarities are still there.
I don't mean to get political, or start a hullabaloo about the right/wrong of the Iraq war, but whether you're red or blue you might see the same things that I do when I watch the movie now.