First Blood

Passing through the Pacific Northwest town of Hope, drifter John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) is railroaded and thrown in jail for vagrancy by Sheriff Teasle (Brian Dennehy). Abused by the deputies, Rambo, a Vietnam vet, breaks out, which spurs Teasle to launch a manhunt in the wilderness. But Teasle is in over his head. As Rambo's former commanding officer in Special Forces Col. Sam Trautman (Richard Crenna) explains, Rambo was simply the best combat soldier.

Behind Rocky Balboa, John Rambo is Sylvester Stallone's most recognizable role. Overly muscled, swathed in bullet belts and bandanna, carrying a large knife and machine gun, Rambo, like Rocky, is often a down-on-his-luck underdog, a decent man trying to get by life thrown into impossible situations, but against all odds, he triumphs.

Not so in First Blood. The first cinematic outing of John Rambo feels like a repudiation of everything that followed. It's not a glorification of cartoonish machismo; it's an examination of a troubled individual and the homeland he no longer feels welcome in. 

Instead of the patriotic hero who guns down America's enemies by the dozen, Rambo is a vulnerable, emotionally damaged veteran, at odds with the country he swore to defend, lost, confused, and afraid. In Vietnam, he was the ultimate killing machine, but those skills don't translate to stable civilian life, and when pushed too far, he explodes. The words Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) are never uttered in the movie, but Rambo clearly suffers from some form of it.

First Blood brings the Vietnam War to American soil. The scenes of Rambo stalking through the forest, picking off Teasle's men one-by-one (but not killing them), have a stripped-down, raw intensity. Rambo builds traps, uses the terrain to his advantage, and frustrates the more numerous and better armed deputies, not unlike the Viet Cong harassing better equipped and numerically superior American forces.

The movie builds and builds as the situation grows increasingly out of hand and desperate on both sides. People are hurt. A few are killed. It looks painful for everyone. By the end, Rambo has the whole town under siege until it's down to him and Teasle and then Rambo and Trautman.

Here is the greatest irony of the Rambo series. We have seen the stalking, we have seen the shootouts, and we have seen explosions and chases, but the climax of the first movie is not violence but emotion. Rambo has dispatched Teasle and is preparing a final stand against the state police and National Guard when Trautman tries to talk him down.

And Rambo explodes, not physically but emotionally. 

He decries the treatment he has received, the people who spat on him, and the country that turned its back on him. He weeps, crying uncontrollably for the friends he lost in Vietnam, haunted by the horrors he saw and experienced. Trautman, the career military man who recruited and trained Rambo, shaping him into the perfect soldier, looks stunned and shamed, as if realizing for the first time the toll of what he's done to this man.

Rambo took on an entire police force. He took on the National Guard. He faced down the man most responsible for his immediate predicament, and it didn't change anything. He is still bitter, still lonely, still lost. For a brief time, the feud with Teasle gave him direction, but once it ended, he's back where he was: a broken shell of a man.