One morning in the not-too-distant present -- McDonald's has served over 45 billion burgers and Brezhnev's picture still adorns Soviet office walls -- Americans wake up to find: NATO dissolved and Western Europe turned pacifist and neutral; the Greens in power in Bonn and Pershing 2s banned from West German soil; the United States and the Soviet Union locked in a de facto nuclear freeze; Nicaragua armed to withstand a U.S. invasion; the oligarchy overthrown in El Salvador and the military crushed in Honduras; Mexico's aborted revolution successfully revived; and free showings of Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky scheduled at theaters in American towns from El Paso to Butte. In other words, - The Nation's political project is being, put into practice on a global scale.

So far so good. The premise of Red Dawn, which is announced before the titles in a series of punchy Brechtian headlines, may be hilariously implausible, but it's hardly worth the worry expended by liberal critics, who take director/writer John Milius too much at his word, fearing that this campy teen adventure is the first salvo of the coming fascist Kultarkampf.

Not to worry; Milius is no Goebbels. When he hears the word "Hollywood" he reaches for his guns, but his intentions are more mischievous than murderous and his message is remarkably mixed.

Inevitably, an irksome contradiction impinges on the extraordinary scenario of world- historical events that opens the film. World War III starts when a Cuban-Nicaraguan-Soviet commando force drops into a small town in the Rockies, accompanied by an off-screen nuclear first strike against Omaha, Washington, D.C., and other expendable targets. The strange invaders land on the grounds of the high school in Calumet, Colorado, where a black teacher is in the middle of a lecture about medieval Mongolian hordes and the depredations of Genghis Khan. He's the first to get blown away. Having dispatched that irony, the commandos pretty much demolish the community and subjugate its terrified inhabitants.

The extremely fast times at Calumet High spin off the adventure plot. A small band of boys, players and fans of the Wolverines football team, escapes to the hills in a pickup, stopping at the local sporting goods store along the way for guns and ammo. Presently they are joined by two teen-age girls, and the new Wolverines terrorist front swings into action. They blow up tanks with captured rockets, lure enemy soldiers into lethal ambushes and generally play such brilliant guerrilla games that a General Giap or a George Habash would be envious.

If you swivel the politics about 45 degrees to the left, Red Dawn begins to look more like a celebration of people's war than a horror movie about the evil empire. For all his Zen fascism, or whatever he calls it, Milius has produced the most convincing story about popular resistance to imperial oppression since the inimitable Battle of Algiers. He has only admiration for his guerrilla kids, and he understands their motivations ‹ and excuses their naivete ‹ far better than the hip liberal filmmakers of the 1960s counterculture. I'd take the Wolverines from Colorado over a small circle of friends from Harvard Square in any revolutionary situation I can imagine.

At the same degree off center, the relationships of fish to sea, and of fish to fish, are realistically if simply drawn. The Calumet townsfolk surrender because resistance from their small urban base is impossible; armed struggle is conceivable only from the sierra. The groveling Mayor clings to his role as collaborationist, and the resident floozies flock to the macho aggressors. Merchants try to pursue business as usual and a few brave souls do what they can to help the guerrillas.

The imperialists behave like beasts when their power is threatened. The shoot the natives in retaliation for Wolverine raids, and they detain and execute potential protest leaders in a nice restatement of the Phoenix program used by the C.l.A. in Vietnam. Although the Wolverines' terrorism makes life difficult for their countrymen, the guerrillas will not repudiate their tactics. Terror is their only weapon.

The invaders argue among them selves. The Cuban captain (Ron "Super fly" O'Neal, the film's most charming and convincing character) is a veteral adviser to people's wars from Indochin; to Angola, and he comes to sympathize more with the guerrillas than with the Second World commissars who oversa the occupation of Calumet. "Now I'm just like you‹a policeman," he sneers at the Rasputin of a Russian officer who gives the orders. The Cuban knows all about hearts and minds, and in the end he remains the most rounded and humane warrior in the film.

The teen guerrillas have their fallings out as well. One girl rails against a male comrade for his petty chauvinism ( "Did I do something wrong? " he pathetically rejoins); a boy allows his father, the Mayor, to turn him into a mole; they all have a terrible time snuffing the traitor in their midst when the deed must be done. When one young guerrillera worries, "That's what they'd do," another counters, "Yeah, but we live here." The territorial imperative is stronger than any doctrine. As always, the Wolverines' politics grow out of the barrels of their guns.

Guns are fun in the mountains, and the good guys handle theirs lovingly. The one clear point to the movie is that the National Rifle Association is dead right. When the invaders take Calumet, they seize the firearms registration records and arrest everyone who owns a piece, proving that guns don't kill people; gun registration does. A bumper sticker underscores the idea: "They can have my gun when they pry it from my coId dead fingers."

The rest of the politics is much more obscure than the Cyrillic- script advertisements suggest or literal-minded audiences infer. There's not much talk about ideology or economic systems, or even good guys against bad ones. A U.S. Air Force pilot who parachutes into the Wolverines' camp tells the kids the big war started because the "two tough guys on the block" were itching for a fight. In other words, there is not much difference between the First World and the Second, and the moral high ground must be located in the Third. Communist revolutionaries may disagree, and it does seem too pat to put a plague on both big houses, but that political position is not so different from the one taken by the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, for instance.

There are some other problems. The easy feminism of the guerrilla campfire hides a deeper mystification of sex and violence: the women are enigmatic animals, able to kill themselves and others with cold passion. The examples of Third World revolutionary tigresses and New Left terror queens have made their imprint on Milius's imagination. And then there's the nutty notion that Nicaragua could invade America, fair play though such a turnaround would be.

If you read Red Dawn as a parable of American intervention in Central America, say, or even an evocation of what might have happened in Poland if the Russians had moved in to crush Solidarity, it's not so hideous. Certainly there's nothing here that should encourage adherence to the Republican platform or a vote for Reagan. The movie cannot be seen as propaganda for a bigger defense budget; the partisans (as they're called at the movie's end) do not need Tridents or B-l bombers. Simpson-Mazzoli‹never a great piece of immigration law‹gets an oblique pan: "They opened up the door down there and the Mexicans, Nicaraguans and Cubans poured in," someone remembers. But the eye and ear of the moviegoer can make of Red Dawn what they like Some of it is strong stuff, but who, after watching the goings on in Dallas last month, can disagree wholeheartedly with the disembodied voice from a loudspeaker at the Calumet reeducation camp: "America is a whorehouse where the ideals of your forefathers are prostituted" Maybe Milius believes that too.