Ted Kotcheff’s 1982 film “First Blood” may be noted for how downbeat it is. The lead character, John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) is a tragic figure, a Vietnam veteran who finds that another one of his friends has died, and, on the way out of town, is accosted by a cruel sheriff (Brian Dennehy) who threatens him with charges of vagrancy. That he is eventually badgered back into trauma-induced “war mode” is presented as a tragedy in “First Blood,” and while John Rambo was described as an ultra-efficient killing machine for the government, the audience’s ambivalence about the Vietnam War made his soldierly skill seem like a useless vestige of an ill-advised conflict.
Just three years later, Rambo’s tone changed dramatically with George P. Cosmatos’s Rambo: First Blood Part II, a broad, lumbering action movie with a propaganda flavor that audiences loved and critics hated. In “Part II”, Rambo is tasked with returning to Vietnam to retrieve the prisoners still being held there. A telling line of dialogue is when Rambo asks if America can “win this time.” The whole picture is dedicated to the symbolic – the use of cinema as an instrument of jingoistic justice – victory in the Vietnam War and the
restoration of America’s place in the world as an invincible war machine. Rambo is the best tool in the arsenal of the war machine. The same can be said for Peter Macdonald’s 1988 sequel, Rambo III. This interpretation of Rambo as a symbol of right-wing, Reagan-era military power is common among critics, and it is difficult to discuss John Rambo without acknowledging this.
“He Was Never Proactive”
However, one who disagrees with the mainstream critique of Rambo is Stallone himself. Back in 1998, in an interview with Cigar Aficionado Magazine (long before the release of Rambo and Rambo: Last Blood), Stallone expressed disappointment with the generally accepted interpretation of the character he created (Stallone co-wrote the scripts for all five Rambo films). Stallone argued that John Rambo could not have been a tool of the government because he never expressed any agency or received financial compensation for his actions.RELATED:
Rambo: 10 Reasons The Sequels Could Never Top First Blood
“You know, people never really understood Rambo. I shouldn’t say that; a certain faction dismissed Rambo as a violent tool for the right wing. Whereas Rambo was never antigovernment, [he] worked on his own, received no financial remuneration and was always in the business of extracting prisoners at the cost of his own life. I did not understand the criticism. His was much more of a martyr position than one of being proactive; he was never proactive.”
In this regard, Stallone is right: Rambo was usually hired as a free agent, not as a regular soldier. Stallone’s argument that Rambo is a martyr certainly holds true when looking at First Blood alone. It is in the next two sequels that Rambo transforms from martyr to military superhero. Stallone notes that Rambo did not live in the suburbs, blissfully waiting for the government to call, but was a lonely hermit often found in the jungle, isolated from trauma and unable to communicate.
“They Came To Him”
For Stallone, this was plenty of evidence to suggest Rambo’s willingness to stay politically neutral.“He was happy to stay in the jungle. If you noticed, every time they came to him. But that is not the way it was interpreted. Through political cartoons and this interpretation, Rambo is as close as we get to Tyrannosaurus Rex, this Genghis Kahn of the Third World, but please, that’s not true.”
Cigar Aficionado interviewer Gordon Mott also raises the issue of Rambo’s propaganda
nature, addressing the open and valid concerns of some critics about using First Blood Part II as a way to change the public’s perception of the Vietnam War. It is worth remembering that 1985 was in the middle of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, and the United States was sending military support to the wars in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. These wars always smelled suspicious, and it was eventually revealed that the US was openly supporting activities that would be considered terrorism. Ultimately, the U.S.
General Accounting Office shut down Regan’s Office of Public Diplomacy unit for engaging in “prohibited covert propaganda activities designed to influence the media and the public to support the Administration’s policies in Latin America.” It’s easy to see that Rambo is directly involved in this. The government didn’t write Rambo, but the bigoted portrayals of American intervention in the films certainly matched the real-life propaganda.
Rambo. Vs Platoon
Stallone felt this comparison was unfair, seeing John Rambo as simply being blunter than some of his more critical, downbeat war movie contemporaries.“That’s what happened. Rambo really became a tool of right-wing imperialism as opposed to James Bond, who was much more liberal in his approach. When [‘First Blood’] came out, there were other films like ‘Platoon’ and ‘Coming Home’ and ‘Born on the Fourth of July,’ which threw Rambo into an even further Black Knight situation, where he was the aggressor and Grim Reaper”
It also didn’t help that Rambo, unlike the heroes of those other movies, was a large, over-muscled, beast of a man. His physical prowess set him apart from the more commonly proportioned soldiers in Oliver Stone movies.
“I understand it, because Rambo was such a physical character; it’s tough for us to think he’s vulnerable by any means. Still, [‘First Blood’] I’m very proud of. The second one went into a whole different exploratory area; it became cartoonish. Bigger than life. That’s where it went into Joseph Campbell. You know, the creation of a mythic hero because obviously what he did could never be accomplished. But the first one could. He suffered a lot worse in the first one and survived.”
By the time “Rambo: Last Blood” came out in 2019, the Campbellian myth had long since overtaken any sense of personal tragedy or martyrdom, depicting John Rambo as the final warrior willing to fight against evil Mexican drug cartels. Stallone holds that Rambo is not a superhero or a badass, even after all the criticism of a generation ago.Those who have seen his movies may disagree.