John Rambo kills only one person in First Blood, which is a significant departure from his portrayal in David Morrell’s novel of the same name. First Blood debuted in theaters in 1982 with Sylvester Stallone playing drifter and Vietnam veteran John Rambo. When Rambo wanders into a small town, he is arrested for vagrancy by the evil Sheriff Teasle (Brian Dennehy), giving Rambo PTSD and forcing him to wage a one-man war against the local police.
Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo films are a large franchise in which Rambo himself becomes one of Stallone’s signature characters. While the Rambo films are considered some of Stallone’s most violent films, Rambo himself is significantly toned down in First Blood, at least in terms of the kill count. Compared to Morrell’s 1972 novel, First Blood made one huge change to Rambo as a character.
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In the First Blood novel, Rambo’s arrest pushes him over the edge, leading him to slaughter anyone who comes to re-capture him after his escape. As Morrell states in the First Blood DVD commentary, he wanted to portray the horrible effects of PTSD on Vietnam veterans and show the reality of a war brought to American soil, with Morrell also basing Rambo on real-life soldier Audie Murphy. As a result, per Morrell, the body count in his novel is “perhaps 250 people,” but this also caused some concern among First Blood’s producers leading the movie adaptation.
As executive producer Andrew Vajna states in the DVD documentary Drawing First Blood,
“We didn’t want to make this guy a crazy murderer, which is what the script felt like…we wanted to make him more like a guy who was really lost, and he didn’t know what to do with his life, and he was a victim of circumstances.”This led to First Blood only including a single on-screen death, namely of Teasle’s fellow officer Galt (Jack Starrett).
In First Blood, Galt’s death is a clear act of self-defense on Rambo’s part: Galt shoots a defenseless Rambo from a helicopter, and Rambo throws a rock at the helicopter, causing Galt to fall. While Morrell’s novel is much grayer in terms of whether Rambo or Teasle is the real protagonist, First Blood puts the audience in Rambo’s corner with his horrific abuse by the city police and his generally bad fate. As Rambo evolved into a much more likeable—and even tragic—character, the change gave him a future on the big screen that would otherwise have been unavailable to him.
After the original ending of First Blood was changed to Rambo’s survival (versus his death in the novel), First Blood opened the door to allow Rambo to return. The Rambo franchise couldn’t have happened if he had died, but it also couldn’t have happened if Rambo had been portrayed as he was in Morrell’s novel. While Rambo is capable of wiping out entire armies single-handedly, First Blood took the crucial step of showing that this killing machine is also merciful.