That\u2019s putting it mildly. But the time that novel was reissued, the Rambo the world knew was decidedly less complicated \u2013 thanks primarily to the tonal shifts of the second film in the series, which hit theaters 35 years ago this week. The film adaptation of First Blood<\/em>, though released in 1982, feels more like a holdover from the action cinema of the 1970s; sure, it\u2019s bloody and violent, and guns are fired and explosions are had, but its action is grounded in the contradictions of its central character, not unlike Death Wish <\/em>or The French Connection<\/em> or even Taxi Driver<\/em>. Rambo: First Blood Part II<\/em>, on the other hand, is full-on \u201880s Action Product, a pivot consecrated by Rambo III<\/em> three years later. (The fourth and fifth films, released decades later and thus responding to the political and cultural winds of their own moments, don\u2019t really apply here.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n In retrospect, what\u2019s most shocking about First Blood<\/em>, particularly considering how the character (and Sylvester Stallone, who played him) have been championed by right wing culture, is how vehemently anti-authoritarian \u2013 and, specifically, anti-cop \u2013 it is. The John Rambo we first meet is soft-spoken, earnest, and friendly, up in the Pacific Northwest looking for an old buddy he served alongside in \u2018Nam, but he stiffens up immediately when the good ol\u2019 boy local sheriff (Brian Dennehy) starts in on him. \u201cWhy are you pushing me?\u201d he asks, honestly; the lawman drives him out to the edge of town and tells him, \u201cIf you want some advice, get a haircut and take a bath. People wouldn\u2019t hassle you so much.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n It turns out that John Rambo isn\u2019t quite what his long hair and scruffy clothes seem to indicate: a former Green Beret and recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor, a Vietnam War hero. But he just won\u2019t do what he\u2019s told, and when the roughness of the local cops triggers a PTSD-induced escape, the bloodthirsty deputies chase him out to the woods. Their desire to save face and exact revenge ends up harming themselves more than him; this is a gang that cannot shoot straight, and ditto and double that for the buffoonish weekend warrior National Guardsmen who comprise the second wave (\u201cI do this part time, I didn\u2019t come here to get killed!\u201d).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rambo ends up taking the fight back to the winkingly named Hope, Washington, barreling through a police blockade (cue the triumphant music), blowing up an army transport truck (and some poor schmuck\u2019s gas station), and proceeding to shoot up nothing less than Main Street, USA, concluding with the gleeful slo-mo machine-gunning of the sheriff\u2019s station. It feels like a suicide mission, and it was intended to be; the film originally ended with Rambo taking his own life, a slight modification of the novel\u2019s conclusion, in which his mentor, Col. Troutman (Richard Crenna) puts him out of his misery. That\u2019s not all that was changed; one of the key contradictions of the character Morrell wrote was his counterculture edge (\u201cHe would let his hair grow long, stop shaving, carry his few possessions in a rolled-up sleeping bag slung over his shoulder, and look like what we then called a hippie\u201d), and while some of those elements remain, particularly in his early conflicts with the law, the film adds a breakdown in which Rambo shares the (apocryphal<\/a>) story of Vietnam War protestors spitting on vets, and says of the war itself, \u201cSomebody wouldn\u2019t let us win!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n That notion is the key connective tissue between First Blood<\/em> and Rambo<\/em> \u2013 established in the pre-title scene, in which Troutman recruits a now-imprisoned Rambo for a recon mission to find lost POWs back in \u2018Nam. \u201cSir, do we get to win this time?\u201d Rambo asks, and after Troutman replies, \u201cThis time it\u2019s up to you,\u201d Jerry Goldsmith\u2019s score goes heavy with Spaghetti Western guitar. Later Troutman refers to Rambo by his own terms \u2013 \u201ca pure fighting machine with only a desire to win a war someone else lost\u201d \u2013 and Rambo again references those damn dirty hippes (\u201cI came back to the States and found another war going on\u2026 kind of a quiet war, a war against all the soldiers returning. The kind of war you don\u2019t win\u201d).<\/p>\n\n\n\n But aside from those callbacks, Rambo<\/em> (co-written by Stallone and James Cameron, though the latter would all but disavow his contributions) divorces itself entirely from the reality of the inaugural outing. When he\u2019s briefed, Rambo is sternly warned that he is to take photos of POWs only (\u201cUnder no circumstances are you to engage the enemy,\u201d he\u2019s told, an audience laugh line if I\u2019ve ever heard one), and it\u2019s worth remembering that the body count in First Blood<\/em> is quite low, with our antihero even announcing, after the first casualty, \u201cI don\u2019t want any more hurt!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n That is, to put it mildly, not<\/em> the case this time around; Rambo does not hesitate to mow down dozens and dozens of his targets in Rambo <\/em>and Rambo III<\/em>; a difference worth nothing is that, unlike in First Blood<\/em>, his enemies in the sequels aren\u2019t white people. Now, of course, you can argue that this is the result of location and narrative; Rambo<\/em> takes him to Vietnam, Rambo III<\/em> to Afghanistan. But the question to ask is why those particular narratives were crafted \u2013 why the filmmakers decided this is what audiences wanted to see Rambo do (and who they wanted him to kill, without hesitation.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n An even trickier question lies in how to make an anti-authority, anti-government flag-waver in the middle of the Reagan era. The filmmakers found that answer in the character of Major Marshall Roger T. Murdock, played by Charles Napier as a William Atherton-style mid-\u201880s fuming petty bureaucrat who feigns concern early on (\u201cMaybe the government didn\u2019t care. Maybe certain sections of the population didn\u2019t care. But my committee cares\u201d) but ultimately tells Troutman, \u201cIt wasn\u2019t my war, Colonel. I\u2019m just here to clean up the mess,\u201d and ends up aborting the mission in the midst of Rambo\u2019s extraction leaving him to fend for himself \u2013 and, presumably, die in the jungles of Vietnam.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The motive for this plot turn doesn\u2019t hold water as much more than cartoon villainy (or proto-Deep State nonsense), though more was presumably intended; Ted Kotcheff, the director of First Blood<\/em>, explained that \u201cRambo\u2019s treatment by the redneck sheriff and his deputies was a microcosm of the way America had treated their returning veterans,\u201d and it seems possible that Stallone and Cameron\u2019s script was broadly attempting to make the character\u2019s abandonment a metaphor for the entire Vietnam conflict. In an interview that summer of 1985, the screenwriter\/star explained, \u201cThe vets were told wrong. The people who pushed the wrong buttons all took a powder. The vets got the raw deal and were left holding the bag. What Rambo is saying is that if they could fight again, it would be different.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The nuance wiped away by Rambo <\/em>was a distant memory by the time the nonsensically-titled Rambo III<\/em> arrived in multiplexes three summers later. By airdropping Rambo and Troutman into the actual invasion of Afghanistan by \u201880s Hollywood\u2019s favorite villain, the Russians, the personal, character-driven storytelling of First Blood<\/em> had evolved into straight-up agitprop, inserting the fictional (and impossible) character into a real, and complex, geopolitical struggle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But by then, audiences knew what they were getting: their sweaty, shirtless hero, sporting a comically oversized physique and a bandana wrapped around his permanent wet-head, taking out his faceless, foreign enemies. (These increasingly elaborate executions, many via crossbow, mirror the one-upsmanship of the \u201cgags\u201d in another quintessential \u201880s franchise: the Friday the 13th<\/em> movies.) As it comes to its cartoon conclusion, with Rambo and Troutman side-by-side to face off a full army of choppers, tanks, troops, and trucks, Troutman asks our hero, \u201cWhaddaya say, John?\u201d And he responds with a bon mot worthy of Wilde: \u201cF*ck \u2018em.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI wasn’t involved with the films,\u201d Morrell writes. \u201cHowever, I did write a novelization for each of the sequels in an effort to supply the characterization that they omitted. I felt that it was important to remind readers of what the novel’s Rambo had been about.\u201d His tact and understatement is admirable; it must have been tough to watch Hollywood take this complicated story, with its morally ambiguous characters, and turn it into a video game, full of pop-up shooters, cardboard villains, and A- Team <\/em>violence. There are no stakes or no gravity to the later Rambo<\/em> movies; it\u2019s all become white noise, a brick wall of explosions, machine gun fire, and rah-rah music.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/first-blood-1024x576.jpg\")
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