Rambo Elegy

The development of Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo has been well documented over the years and yet appears counter to the trajectory of traditional masculinity over the same span of time. The iconic action character gripped the American imagination over a span of four motion pictures from 1982 to 2008, not including the 2019 Rambo: Last Blood. Worldwide distribution of the first four films - First Blood 1982, Rambo: First Blood Part II 1985, Rambo III 1988, and Rambo 2008 - grossed $819 million at last count.

Even a cursory glance at the Rambo character, and its many children’s action figures, shows a man fantastically bulked up and ready for combat. This is a man out on his own, a loner, a white man with a gun, a one-man army. Here is a powerfully built, yet soft-spoken man who solves his problems in only one way: with violence. He achieves heroic results to be sure, but at the price of astonishing body counts. This is hyper masculinity at its most comic best, right down to the male-armored rubberized skin.

Then there is Rambo’s fetish for exotic weapons. At some point during the four films, the character wields all forms of military ordinance including hand-held 50 caliber machine guns, a variety of grenade launchers, AK-47s, helicopter gunship rockets, large-bore tank guns, explosives of all sorts and his personal killing knife. Rambo was trained as an elite special forces operative and demonstrates an extraordinary range of combat skills.

And yet there is another side to his character most apparent in the first and last of this four-film sequence. Stallone acting as co-screenwriter is largely responsible for humanizing the original literary Rambo from David Morrell’s 1972 novel First Blood which features even more brutal, unflinching violence. The film Rambo is a sad, disaffected and disillusioned man traumatized by his Vietnam experience in combat and as a POW. Greg Beam in his review of the character for Medium (Dec 7, 2018) highlights this dual nature especially in Rambo’s general reluctance to take on further combat assignments.

The angry/tearful scene toward the end of First Blood as Rambo breaks down in front of his commander Colonel Trautman, played by Richard Crenna, and reveals his deep mourning for the loss of his operations unit Baker Team - every man dead now except for him - explains the character’s mostly silent demeanor and thousand yard stare throughout most of the film. This dimension of the Rambo character was largely sustained in the later films, although the “one-man army” aspect became the main feature.

Rambo presents us with a heroic male icon with over-the-top hyper masculinity on steroids. Of course, each of these films was produced as a response to the popularity (and box-office receipts) of the previous films. But in general the depiction of an ultra masculine hero during this time period was akin to boys of an earlier generation reading and re-reading tattered Marvel comic books. To be something greater than oneself is an entirely human aspiration, especially during a time when masculinity in real life had become complicated.

Watch the new Netflix documentary Sly (2023) to learn more about Sylvester Stallone’s life and his contributions to screenwriting these first four Rambo films.