First Blood (1982)

An unexpected pleasure. The only movie I'd seen previous about a character named John Rambo was Rambo (2008), which was not very good. I hesitate to call this "the first in the Rambo franchise" because it so clearly is not the first movie in a franchise, and the spinoffs did it a lot of harm.

This isn't an action movie (a movie about violence and acrobatics, which celebrates its material), it's a drama (a movie about human relationships and values) which features a lot of violence.

This is a man's movie. There aren't any women in it. Seriously, I don't think there's a single speaking role for a woman. So it's a movie about masculinity. The masculinity here is pretty different than anything you'll see in a modern man's movie, I think. The men here cry.

Sheriff Will Teasle, crying after his friend dies and he gets ambushed by Johnny

Johnny crying, remembering a dead friend

Johnny cries at the emotional climax of the movie. He lets out the stress and loneliness and horror he has felt for years. This isn't portrayed as a moment of weakness. It's necessary, important, healthy. He's still gonna die in a minute.

In the actual movie Johnny lives, which is bullshit. Through the whole movie we've seen, repeatedly, that the cops and national guard just will not obey a "hold your fire!" order. I think they fire against order 3 or 4 times in a 90 minute movie. No way none of these guys takes a potshot at him. The movie is cheaper for it. The final scene, where he walks out of the police station in handcuffs while military trumpets play some funereal song, is laughable. This isn't a movie about how the military is great! It shouldn't end with full military honors!

I'm not happy about the focus on war itself, and the VC as the enemy, as the cause of Johnny's trauma. I read somewhere that soldiers who don't see action have PTSD more often than those who do. On my reading of the movie, it's only important that Johnny is a Green Beret who has been abducted and tortured by the VC because it lends some plausibility to his survival.

Johnny misunderstands the cause of his pain when he blames protestors spitting on him when he returns from Vietnam. This probably never happened. Johnny is alone, and isolated, and unmedicated, when he comes back from war, but this isn't the fault of the general public, it's the fault of an incompetent and underfunded Veteran's Department.

And of course the war itself was unjust, unnecessary, and brutal. Johnny wasn't off saving France from the Nazis, he was killing a bunch of farmers who wanted freedom. You can't talk about the negative reaction to Vietnam veterans (which, again, didn't exist) without talking about the reason people were upset about the war in the first place. When we see a VC soldier, he's a torturer, sadistic, barely human. Good thing he's only in frame for a few seconds. Wish we could get those seconds back.

The average citizen of Vietnam, as Johnny sees him

Nor can you talk about Vietnamese torture of POWs without talking about American atrocities in the war. These things feed off each other. They don't exist in a vacuum.

Anyway, Johnny would be traumatized even if he'd escaped the war unscathed. The real villain is the government which recruited him and trained him to be a killing machine. At the end of the movie, when he talks about the structure of the military, and its lack in modern society, we should take his words as an indictment of the military, that they have trained him to need that structure. (Of course there are plenty of problems with modern society too!)

On the other hand, a movie can't be about everything at once. This one is about a broken man trying to survive with dignity against a hostile police force. That's a good subject.

This movie is unabashedly and virulently anti-cop. I don't have a problem with that.

Everybody in this movie (VC excepted) is a human being. Nobody with a line is just some grunt. The cops are brutal but they aren't faceless fascist stormtroopers; they're lazy, proud, angry, reluctant, glory-hungry, or cruel as real human beings. That's wonderful.

This isn't an action movie, but if you want to focus on the violent scenes, you'll be pleased at the artistry on display. Choreography is clear and dramatic. I always knew where everybody was (except in the brief sequence where Johnny is hiding, and we see his ambush from the cop's point of view, which is intentional) and what the stakes were. I always knew what resources everybody had at their disposal, and what they were trying to do. Good stuff. They really did blow up like 10 cars and 2 whole buildings for this movie, I think. No way to get those explosions with miniatures.

There's some really great spelunking here, useful for a hardcore dungeoncrawling game.

Can't see shit? Exactly

The mine is an oppressive, dark, damp place. The rats don't hurt Johnny but they sure are awful! His torch barely lights up a "room". He has to crawl, climb, and wade through chest-high water. He falls and slides. You could never have a team of medieval commandos pull off an operation here. This accords with my experience spelunking, too. I'm pulling some inspiration from this and my caving expeditions for the scenario I'm working on now.

The acting is good. Stallone's barely-coherent rant at the end of the movie stands out, and the conflicting impulses of the sheriff. Some of the characters are probably a little cartoonish, like the brutal cop who beats Johnny and tries to shoot him from the helicopter. I guess there probably are people like that in the world, but it's a bit much to see this guy acting so extra so many times in the first 20 minutes of the movie. Just one or two brutalities would have been enough.

Anyway, it was a good movie, surprisingly good. The director also made Wake in Fright, which is also a good movie about masculinity and these horrible, self-perpetuating cruelty machines masculine society so often constructs. And Weekend at Bernie's, which I haven't seen.