A Film Canon

The most soulful, brooding and contemplative film in the Rambo series, First Blood is also the only one that doesn't take place in a war zone, instead re-imagining small town America as a war zone, and making for an interesting counterpoint to the lush, hyper-nostalgic portrayal of Main Street USA endemic to 80s cinema. Not only is the action peculiarly and poetically determined by topography - established by a cross-country car chase that's exaggerated without being ridiculous, energised by a movement from river to snowline, across thermodrafts and cliff-faces, and condensed to John Rambo's (Sylvester Stallone) lengthy navigation of a mineshaft, after being hounded out of Hope for "vagrancy" by sheriff Will Teasle (Brian Dennehy) - but topography gradually comes to supersede and contain action, as the spectacular Pacific Northwest backdrop segues into the Vietnam jungle. As a result, Rambo's iconic logistical ingenuity and hyperbolic musculature is largely subordinated to his ability as a shapeshifter, a silent, stealthy ripple across the jungle that has more in common with Predator than any of the subsequent Rambo films. Correspondingly, his arsenal is surprisingly undeveloped, despite a plethora of natural and mechanical material, suggesting a more ambivalent attitude towards violence and retribution than his filmic progeny. All the Rambo films are right-wing purification fantasies, but only First Blood feels prescient of this, providing the most eloquent vision of Rambo positioned between two fronts - on the one hand, combatting the quintessentially American prejudice of "Jerktown USA", but, on the other, fulfilling a fantasy, however muted, of a Vietnam-proof body. It's a vision of right-wing vigilantism turned against itself, resulting in the most poignant portrait of Rambo as a descendent of Rocky, marred by a drifting disjunction or dissonance between thought and action, speech and body, inside and out; a tribute to Stallone's talent as an actor as well as a taut muscle.