First Blood

The Rambo character recently became a news item in Belgium because of the renegade soldier Jurgen Conings. I wrote a short post about this as his supporters compare him to the hero Rambo. But in First blood Rambo is not yet the revenging hero from the later movies.

When the movie came out in 1982 it stirred quite a controversy because of the violence. Compared to what has come since then the violence is quite mild but at the time I remember people found it quite shocking. And even now, watching the movie again the violence is disturbing in the way that some of it is quite ‘realistic’ and close to home. And although many get injured, much gets blown up and destroyed by bullets there is only 1 fatal casualty in the movie. The movie is also not very heroic but quite dark. There only seem to be villains in this movie. At first Rambo is the innocent Vietnam veteran whose sacrifices in the war are not recognised by his country. He gets harassed and molested by the local sheriff department without reason and tries to escape. Hunted by prejudiced law officers out for blood Rambo defends himself and the evil deputy meets his doom. From then on the situation spirals out of control, the national guard comes to the aid of the police and both sides are trapped in a logic of violence and revenge. Rambo’s former commanding officer colonel Trautman comes in and suggests to diffuse the situation by letting Rambo escape so that he can be arrested later on somewhere else without further violence. But the sheriff will not be cheated out of his revenge. It ends with the sherif wounded by several bullets and the sheriff’s office completely shot up and a handcuffed Rambo on his way to prison. Superficially the movie has a lot of elements of the western with a lone hero fighting the villains but here instead of the hero there is a traumatised war veteran in need of help, trying to run away from violence without success. And it doesn’t end with the righteous victory of good over evil either, it ends with losers : a dead deputy, a severely injured sheriff and an imprisoned war veteran. The movie has become a classic and the action is still enjoyable, not outdated in any way. The ambiguity of the characters make it stand out compared to other typical action movies and certainly it is far superior to all the Rambo sequels which are all very one dimensional good versus evil revenge movies.