Preparing for War: Revisiting ‘First Blood’

On September 19th, Sylvester Stallone returns to the big-screen as tortured Vietnam War Veteran John Rambo in the final(?) instalment, Rambo: Last Blood. To mark the occasion, we’ll be taking a look back at the franchise as a whole, looking at the fascinating 37 year history of one of Stallone’s most iconic characters. First up is, of course, First Blood. 

The character of John J. Rambo is one that has gripped the minds of audiences across the world since his first introduction on-screen in 1982’s First Blood. While he came to be known as something of a Reagan poster boy across the rest of the 80’s (more on that next week), it is often easy to forget Rambo’s starker, more introspective beginnings.

Based on David Morrell’s novel of the same name, First Blood finds Rambo as a wandering loner, struggling to reintegrate himself within a society that has rejected him. When passing through the small town of Hope, Washington, he is deemed an unwanted nuisance by the town’s local sheriff, Will Teasle (Brian Dennehy), and is arrested for vagrancy. When his treatment at the hands of the local police sparks violent flashbacks of his time in ‘Nam, Rambo snaps and escapes through brutal force, waging an escalating one-man war against Teasle and his men.

The parallels that First Blood are making to the Vietnam War may not be subtle, but they colour this Rambo entry with more of an anti-war attitude than its more jingoistic follow-ups. Authority is shown to be cruel and fascistic, with the parable being made that the highly trained ex-Green Beret Rambo comes to embody the Vietcong, while Teasle and his group of largely young and inexperienced officers representing the invading American troops whose own ego and hubris are what inevitably proves to be their undoing.

In this respect alone, First Blood feels like a different beast to what many may assume a Rambo movie to be like, that of a movie with lots of guns and lots of killing (there’s only one on-screen death throughout this entry). Stallone’s own star power seems decidedly muted in his portrayal of the tortured Vet, and there’s a clear sympathy for those individuals who come out of the Armed Services, only to find a lack of support for them on the home-front.

Stallone’s performance throughout the film goes from stoic to enraged to completely distraught in the film’s final moments, and he handles it all incredibly well. First Blood exhibits his strengths as both a character actor and a physical performer, with Stallone displaying an impressive capability in the moments where Rambo has to call upon his survival skills. And while the final act breakdown has been ridiculed in the past, it works in the context of a man driven to a primal rage and is absolutely distraught by what he has lost and by what he has become.

The action scenes are also noticeably different from the more bombastic and gung-ho that would come to characterise the franchise deeper into the 80s. Director Ted Kotcheff shoots most of the action through stable, calm and collected camera work, with taut editing that establishes a great sense of pace with a no-nonsense attitude. A lot of the combat feels quite visceral in a manner which feels quite grounded and doesn’t revel in gore. The scene in the forest which sees Rambo incapacitate Teasle’s men one by one would not be out of place in a Friday the 13th film. Shot at dusk, with a storm brewing, Kotcheff plays heavily into the slasher playbook, in turn making Rambo into a figure who is both at once worthy of our sympathy but also terrifies us at the same time.

This relationship between the audience and Rambo, a feeling where we don’t know if we should cheer for him or flee from him, doesn’t really come into play again until the fourth film, but it is one of the more intriguing aspects of his character. There are shades of the sort of ‘ma-chesse-mo’ that are more dominant in parts two and three, namely with the introduction of Richard Crenna’s Colonel Trautman and the spouting of lines like ‘God didn’t make Rambo, I made him’ – but for the most part First Blood plays out much more like a thriller than it ever does a characteristic 80’s action movie.

First Blood is largely considered the best Rambo entry, and it is hard to disagree. This is a film that has a lean, no-fuss approach to film-making, one that takes its character and his past trauma seriously. It is aged remarkably well thanks to this sense of efficiency, and for the more sensitive approach towards its themes (relative to the franchise that is). Both one of the finest films of ‘82, and of Stallone’s career full stop.

Check back with us next week when we go see if we get to win this time with our retrospective on Rambo: First Blood Part 2.