It’s not bad, but Honest Trailers missed something, I think.
To wit: back in 1985, there was nothing really ironic about Rocky IV. At least, from the point of view of us watching it. We really and truly were using things like sporting events to serve as proxy fights with a vicious, cruel, and frankly evil opposition regime that dreamed of taking over the world, because if we had started shooting instead human civilization would not have survived above the township level. At that, Rocky IV is propaganda. The USA was just starting to grasp that maybe, just maybe, this was all going to end with us somehow winning the war. Which, of course, meant that then we went on to the next war, which is thankfully a lot less likely to end up nuking every city in the USA with a population greater than 250,000.
Anyway. Kids today, huh?
That is an exasperating problem I am starting to encounter more and more: people just don’t remember or never knew what the Cold War with the Soviets was like.
And that seems to mean they can’t take it seriously:
“You’re just exaggerating”
“That never would have happened” and the infuriating
“Both sides were the same anyway”
It drives me nuts.
Looking that deeply into a Rocky movie is like using scuba gear to explore a kiddie pool. It’s a Rocky movie. People go to Rocky movies for the following things:
1) A review of the previous Rocky movies (Starting with 2)
2) The promise of an upcoming fight
3) Rocky experiences some kind of adversity
4) Rocky Trains
5) Rocky gets pounded for several rounds
6) The music changes, and Rocky decides that getting pounded is not the way to win a fight.
7) The opponent notices the change in music. He becomes unsettled.
8) Rocky starts hitting the other guy back.
9) The other guy falls down.
10) Rocky raises his hands in victory, even though his face looks like a piece of tenderized meat.
11) FREEZE FRAME
12 Credits
Reagan’s “Evil Empire” epithet. Accidentally putting the Soviets on high alert with a joke he told that wasn’t supposed to go on the air. Wolverines (Red Dawn). The Day After. The Hunt for Red October, and Red Storm Rising (Clancy wrote a lot more novels, but those are the two that really *matter*; I should probably read them again).
And then, in 1989, it all suddenly *wasn’t*. In. One. Year. And it was mostly bloodless, if your last name wasn’t Ceaucescu(sp?). Or if you weren’t Chinese (hopefully Xi’s current antics backfire on the PRC leadership soon, without causing a massive bloodbath; and when China finally gets a popularly elected government, one of the first things that the new government should do is raise a Goddess of Liberty statue in Tiananmen Square, with a plaque to Tank Man at its base).
Hard to believe.