His mission is presented as if the war could still be won years after the Paris Peace Accords by honoring the pain of prisoners of war. In Part II, that same empathy for prisoners of war and MIA soldiers inexplicably pulls Rambo out of prison and puts him back into Vietnam after the war has ended to murder innumerable Vietnamese and save POWs as a one-man extrajudicial army. As a screenwriter, Stallone himself seems to be quite a moralist, fighting to make Rambo turn himself in at the end of the first film rather than getting killed or killing himself. Rambo is no longer vulnerable: he is the perfect weapon with absolute stoicism and an absolutely shredded Rocky IV physique. Rambo: First Blood Part II undoes all of this. But Rambo’s anger and pain don’t need to be clever or new to be genuine. First Blood isn’t trying to be clever either it’s one of the many films that dissects the Vietnam/Nixon era without having much new to say about it. This is not to say that First Blood is a realistic film - a National Guard uses a bazooka to trap Rambo in a mine - but it is sodden with pathos. Rambo has not psychologically recovered from his time at war, and he’s probably going to go to jail for retaliating against law enforcement.
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His CO barely knows how to comfort him, and nothing feels resolved. The film ends with him sobbing in the arms of his former commanding officer. Rambo oscillates between fear and emotional repression until he breaks down in over the guilt he has borne for years.
The law gives chase, and the conflict escalates until there is nothing but Pyrrhic victory for both sides. He’s just like any piece of American violence, digested and sterilized until it only exists as a justification for current violence.Īs a polemic, First Blood is what it says on the tin: In the film, a decorated Vietnam veteran is retraumatized by a sadistic sheriff, fights back, and then flees into the woods, leaving traps in his wake. There’s a clear through-line of Rambo’s diminution from a complex byproduct of American imperialism to a hollowed-out vigilante with more in common with Jason Voorhees than any real soldier. This isn’t just flattening a character for commercial purposes.
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Usually a franchise character of Rambo’s ilk makes a radical departure when there is a change in creative force, medium, or audience (for all three, see: the Starship Troopers show Roughnecks, the various RoboCop TV series, and, yes, the Rambo cartoon.)īut Stallone is Rambo, and he co-wrote all of the movies. One expects this kind of blatant disregard for character and narrative from Mortal Kombat: Robocop and ED-209 dismembering Johnny Cage with a hail of bullets is an extension of the nose-thumbing gross-out humor of the ‘90s that tries to have its irony both ways. One of them, RoboCop, is already on the Mortal Kombat 11 roster, enthusiastically shooting his opponents in the genitals before they explode. Rambo is not the only misused character of ‘80s popular cinema. What the Rambo of Rambo III can do, though, is be as invulnerable and single-minded as any other bit of propaganda. Rambo from the original 1982 film, First Blood, might have known how bad nightmares can be, but I’m not sure that Rambo of Rambo III could know much of anything. The line, first uttered in Rambo III, has bothered me a lot as an endlessly recycled retort before someone punches someone else in the face.But it’s also a bit poignant: Nightmares about trauma are a hallmark intrusive symptom of PTSD. In the announcement trailer, he emerges from the jungle and, in Sylvester Stallone’s 74-year-old mumble-grumble, intones a catchphrase: “I’m your worst nightmare.” The third is traumatized Vietnam veteran John Rambo.
Two of these new characters are returning from the contorted, many-armed history of the series: Rain from Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 and Mileena from Mortal Kombat II. Mortal Kombat 11: Ultimate, a roll-up of the original game and expansions primed for a new wave of consoles, touts a handful of additional fighters.
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