"A man who's been trained to ignore pain, to ignore weather, to live off the land. To eat things that would make a billy goat puke. "
There are certain products out there that are really good ideas but their names have become pop-ish and seemingly overshadow the product itself. People hear the name and they laugh or roll their eyes and dismiss it as being cheesy and not worth their time. But these people could actually be missing out on a good product. That is how I think people feel when they hear the word Rambo. People think of high body counts, mindless killing and yelling while firing an oversized machine gun. But for purposes of this blog I’m not talking about the 2,3 and the latest one. I’m referring to the original movie , First Blood (84%). This is a movie with a body count under five. This is more of a drama than an action film.
I actually wrote a college term paper in one of my film classes about Rambo and got an A. I compared his post war immersion back into society verses Jon Voights’s Luke Martin in Coming Home. Rambo was not permanently physically altered but sustained deep psychological wounds, enough to take offense after being “happily” escorted out of town by the local sheriff. There is plenty of running and shooting in it, one moment of semi-plausible/ semi-not plausible action and a climactic/ anticlimactic ending. However the more subdued ending makes it become more than just an action film. No it is not Oscar caliber, but not many movies are. It just in the upper tier of non –nominated movies.
The film was released in 1982 which is less than ten years removed from the ending of the Vietnam War. So it may not resonate as much now as it did when it first came out but the ideas are the same as other war movies. However, Vietnam was a very unpopular war which displaced many men upon their return from it. This is a short, small movie but it does a fine job of showing one man who just didn’t how to act and didn’t like the way he was being treated. When death and killing are all you know or practice, how are you supposed to live back in the social norm where those aspects are no longer tolerated. It's hard to figure if a movie like this can me made again after the last decade of "everything exploding" action movies. Could the public handle an atypical ending like this nowadays. Perhaps, and it may even be ballsy and inviting enough to be an award winning type of movie.
For a similar yet better vantage point on this, read All Quiet on the Western Front.
