Rambo: First Blood (1982)

December 20, 2023 10:34 AM

A veteran Green Beret is forced by a cruel Sheriff and his deputies to flee into the mountains and wage an escalating one-man war against his pursuers.
posted by TheophileEscargot (28 comments total)

Somehow I never managed to see this in the 41 years since its release. I felt this was not a classic like the first Rocky. Does a reasonable job of depicting him as a traumatized veteran, but the ending felt a bit anticlimactic.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 10:37 AM on December 20, 2023

I love this movie. Filmed in the city of Hope, BC.

I liked the ambiguous anticlimactic ending - trauma carries on, banally.

The "shower" scene at the police station. Left an impression.
posted by porpoise at 10:52 AM on December 20, 2023

I remember watching this with some military brat friends shortly after it hit home video. As you say, it does a pretty good job driving home the way society treated returning Vietnam vets and the trauma they generally had to try to shoulder themselves.

Wikipedia mentions that the original cut was between 180 and 210 minutes, eventually cut down (and slightly reshot) to 93 minutes. I wonder what the original looked like.

Also, it's the movie that started the worst sequel naming convention ever devised by Hollywood:

First Blood
Rambo: First Blood, Part II
Rambo III
Rambo
Rambo: Last Blood
posted by hanov3r at 10:54 AM on December 20, 2023 [5 favorites]

I saw this on TV as a naive youth. I remember being shocked and appalled that the sheriff could just lock up Rambo for... simply being homeless? Maybe the first thing I ever saw that depicted how cruel the police can be.
posted by neckro23 at 10:55 AM on December 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

I have mixed feelings about this now, even though at the time it was by far my favorite Stallone movie. (Yes, including Rocky.) Stallone's good, and Brian Dennehy and Richard Crenna--as the sheriff who won't stop chasing after him and his Special Forces commander, respectively--are great. (There are also a couple of familiar faces in the deputies, David Caruso and Chris Mulkey.) The film also makes great use of the Pacific Northwest setting. I actually had the poster on my wall in college.

But the monologue at the end contains one of the earliest and best-known examples of the promulgation of the myth of the spat-upon Vietnam veteran, and was probably more responsible than anything else in promulgating it. It's a relatively minor thing in the context of the movie itself and probably something that was easy to believe among non-veterans (Stallone avoided serving in the war himself), but it bugs me a bit. Also, he's in waaaaay too good of shape for someone who's been homeless for years.
posted by Halloween Jack at 10:58 AM on December 20, 2023 [4 favorites]

In the originally shot ending, Rambo kills himself.
Which definitely would have made it a bleaker movie.

Makes me wonder though, if Rambo doesn't survive, does the whole 80s action hero genre kick off in the way it did?
posted by madajb at 11:26 AM on December 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

The original book the film is based on ends with Rambo dying - I remember reading an article where the author discusses setting up the rights for the film adaptation and balking at the inclusion of sequel-related rights for a story where the main character dies at the end. (The sequel-related rights were included which ended up being a very lucrative addition for him.)
posted by rmd1023 at 11:31 AM on December 20, 2023

Its a great and flawed movie at the same time. Dennehy needs a mustache to twirl. Crenna needs a monocle. Stallone is jacked, but not inflated and does a great job of looking hunted/haunted

Honestly, I feel like between the inclusion of the spitting legend and then the sequels this move loses a lot of luster. (Weird how gung ho, jingoistic the sequels get - ah the 80s)
posted by drewbage1847 at 11:55 AM on December 20, 2023

Rambo joins the Taliban in the third film.
posted by spikeleemajortomdickandharryconnickjrmints at 12:41 PM on December 20, 2023 [4 favorites]

I haven't seen this since it was on HBO back in the 1980s but every single kid wanted one of those knives with the survival kit in the handle. I used to DREAM about surviving only on fish I caught myself with those three fishhooks. Totally plausible scenario growing up in the suburbs.
posted by bondcliff at 12:46 PM on December 20, 2023 [8 favorites]

Rambo joins the Taliban in the third film.

Uh, EXCUSE ME, I think you mean our allies the noble Mujahideen fighting for freedom against the ruthless Commies!!!
posted by Saxon Kane at 12:53 PM on December 20, 2023 [5 favorites]

This movie traumatized the hell out of me when I was a kid. I remember being appalled the series turned into fun! actiony! 80s! violence!
posted by praemunire at 12:57 PM on December 20, 2023

I love this movie. Some of it hasn't aged well, but it is totally still watchable 40 years later. Also, some of the best lines ever.

I Didn’t Come To Rescue Rambo From You. I Came Here To Rescue You From Him.

Mic drop!
posted by Literaryhero at 2:33 PM on December 20, 2023 [5 favorites]

Back before the writer’s strike the folks over at Kill James Bond (Philosophy Tube’s Abigail Thorne, Alice Caldwell-Kelly of the infamous International Space Station tweet, and Devon) discussed First Blood in depth, and the results were predictably both delightfully profane and insightful.
posted by MarchHare at 3:19 PM on December 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

I remember being shocked and appalled that the sheriff could just lock up Rambo for... simply being homeless?

Dennehy’s character seems to hate hippies and veterans in equal measure, which certainly seems a charmingly incoherent worldview.

I saw this as a teenager when it opened and I’m always amazed in retrospect — given the eighties excessive violence the series came to embody — that the number of confirmed deaths here is one. A quarter-century later, a PG Pirates of the Caribbean movie could easily hit the low three digits for fatalities.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 6:59 PM on December 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

Filmed in the city of Hope, BC.

Again, given how the franchise came to embody a jingoistic USA! USA! vibe, it’s weird to reflect on how the movie was filmed in Canada with a Canadian director working off a script adapted from a book by a Canadian novelist and with a bunch of supporting roles played by, you guessed it.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 7:02 PM on December 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

"...and with a bunch of supporting roles played by, you guessed it."

Frank Stallone?
posted by plastic_animals at 7:26 PM on December 20, 2023 [9 favorites]

I saw this as a teenager when it opened and I’m always amazed in retrospect — given the eighties excessive violence the series came to embody — that the number of confirmed deaths here is one.

And that was accidental.
posted by madajb at 9:57 PM on December 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

Dennehy’s character seems to hate hippies and veterans in equal measure, which certainly seems a charmingly incoherent worldview.

In the novel, Teasle has an issue with Vietnam vets in particular as a Korean War vet who feels forgotten. The only aspect of this that made it into the film is the collection of medals in his office.
posted by Strutter Cane - United Planets Stilt Patrol at 10:42 PM on December 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

Speaking of James Bond, he also buddied up with the Taliban the noble Mujahideen in The Living Daylights.
posted by kirkaracha at 3:38 PM on December 21, 2023

Dennehy’s character seems to hate hippies and veterans in equal measure, which certainly seems a charmingly incoherent worldview.

I don't know how accurately it reflects reality, but a common trope I've seen in media about/involving (Vietnam) war is that the Vietnam Vets feel devalued by society (including older vets) and their generational trauma ignored, while older vets either feel like the Vietnam Vets are whiny babies who didn't really have to sacrifice and fight a real enemy (WW2 vets) or that they are whiny babies who didn't really have to sacrifice and fight a real enemy, and they overshadow their seniors who did (Korean War vets). Plus, from what little I do know about US society during the last years of the Vietnam War, I understand that lots of the soldiers coming home became closely allied with the anti-war (and, by extension, hippie) movement, something that was also a profound change from previous wars. Part of the purpose of the spitting-on-vets myth, it seems to me, was to drive a wedge between veterans and any sort of left-ish or anti-war movements. Anyway, all this to say that I think the "incoherence" in Dennehy's worldview is totes believable. (not to say any less "incoherent" from a Vulcan-logic point of view)
posted by Saxon Kane at 3:51 PM on December 21, 2023 [5 favorites]

Dennehy's character's worldview, that is.
posted by Saxon Kane at 3:52 PM on December 21, 2023

In the novel, Teasle has an issue with Vietnam vets in particular as a Korean War vet who feels forgotten.

I did read the novel maybe thirty-five years ago but had totally forgotten that. You are right that it doesn’t really come across in the finished film; I think of the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam as being separated by a good 15-20 years, and I note that Dennehy was a skeench under eight years Stallone’s elder. If the intention was to preserve this aspect of the dynamic, I can’t say it was too successful.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 2:44 AM on December 22, 2023

In Barry, there are two characters who are supposed to be father and (adult) daughter, but the male actor is only 8 years older than the woman playing his daughter.
posted by Saxon Kane at 10:00 AM on December 22, 2023

Speaking of James Bond, he also buddied up with the Taliban the noble Mujahideen in The Living Daylights.

Yeah, this whole illiterate screaming jihadist rage, terrorism, and misogyny thing they do is all a put on! They went to Oxford, for God's sake!
posted by Naberius at 11:52 AM on December 22, 2023

This would have been a great movie to watch going in cold. But I only knew Rambo as a superhero that had his own cartoon and action figures. It is hard to build suspense when you picture the Rambo from Part II onwards and he's up against Brian Dennehy and some small town cops.
posted by Gary at 4:20 PM on December 22, 2023

Rambo's war experiences left him totally damaged and traumatized, but it also made him a very effective trained killer, and society back home is not remotely equipped to handle either one of those things.

War leaves a lot of people damaged and traumatized, and the wider American society isn't really equipped to handle that either.

Best movie Stallone ever made, and it's not even close.
posted by box at 12:55 PM on December 23, 2023

Whenever I come across a movie reaction of First Blood on Youtube, I watch it. And almost always, the reacters are blown away because they were expecting a "Rambo" movie and not a semi-serious movie about a damaged Vietnam vet.
posted by Stuka at 7:39 PM on December 23, 2023