Red Dawn is a 1984 American war film directed and co-written by John Milius and written by Kevin Reynolds. The film is set in an alternate timeline during the mid-1980s, and deals with an invasion of the United States by the Soviet Union and its Central American allies. However, the onset of World War III is merely in the background of the plot and not fully elaborated upon. The story follows a group of American high school students who resist their foreign occupiers through guerrilla warfare and call themselves the Wolverines, after their high school mascot.

Red Dawn was the first movie in film history to be released in the US with a Motion Picture Association of America PG-13 rating. At the time it was released, Red Dawn was considered the most violent film by the Guinness Book of Records and The National Coalition on Television Violence, with a rate of 134 acts of violence per hour, or 2.23 per minute. National Review Online has named the film #15 in its list of 'The Best Conservative Movies'.