Summer Of Rambo! Part 1: The Broken America Of FIRST BLOOD [4K Review]

We Start Our Series With FIRST BLOOD, Which Is The Exact Opposite Of What You’d Expect; Slow, Deeply Depressing, Character Driven, & Genuinely Great!

This is Part 1 of a 3 part series looking back at the Rambo films, as it shifted from a somber tale of the broken American spirit, to an era of bombastic American Exceptionalism Propaganda, to out-and-out post WOT horror show, all while reviewing the newest 4K boxset from Lionsgate!

This time around, we are focused on the film that started it all: First Blood. 

For a series that shifted into such “American Supremacy” jingoism in its later entries, First Blood has always existed as such an outlier. Released in the final years of “New Hollywood”, First Blood is both an auteur driven drama with a blockbuster budget, and one of the first films to look at the trauma of the Vietnam War on those who fought it.

First Blood follows veteran John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) as he wanders into a small Pacific Northwest town, looking for a bite to eat. Instead of a warm welcome, he comes across Sheriff Teasle (Brian Dennehy), who promptly locks him up for “vagrancy”. When cruelty after cruelty is inflicted on Rambo by the local police, he finally snaps, beats the ever living hell out of everyone in his way, and heads into the woods. What follows is a tale of two men, both carrying demons in their hearts, as they do everything in their power to “win”, even if it tears the entire town apart.

First Blood is, unlike everything that came after it, an anti-war film. It is about the broken men who returned from the Vietnam War, about a country who greeted them with shame rather than empathy, about the inability to turn off the killer instinct after being trained to be an expert in it, and about the social contract that starts to rip and tear when we abandon our own.

First Blood is a film that invests deeply into its characters, specifically on the dualities of its leads. John Rambo is a terrifying, unstoppable killing machine. But, he is also a man broken beyond repair, a deeply wounded person desperate for camaraderie, desperate to find his people. Sheriff Teasle is an upstanding citizen, a man who’d do anything to keep his people and his town safe from any outsider threat. He is also a deeply cruel, petty man who takes any challenge to his authority, no matter how slight, as a mortal sin. 

The escalation that leads to the death of others and the near destruction of an entire town lays at the feet of both of these men, who, out of a sense of “doing what is needed” can not get out of each other’s way. It is a far cry from later films, which, for the most part, abandon these types of character-driven plots for something a bit more simple, and overall bombastic. They have their merits as well, but none really measure up to the quality of First Blood.

Specs:

I’ll mention it in every review, but holy hell the box on the new 4K boxset is gorgeous, you guys. One of my favorite looking boxsets in a while; something worthy of showing off. 

For the film itself, it’s a fantastic transfer that really shows off the deep, dark greens of the pacific northwest, and the Atmos audio mix really lets every gunshot pop, and every Stallone sob really hit. For special features, there is an absolute bevy of BTS archival footage, featurettes, and deleted/alternate scenes. Below is the full batch.

• An American Hero’s Journey 
• A Long Road: 40 Years of First Blood 
• The Hunter and the Hunted: Scoring First Blood
• First Blood: A Look Back
• Drawing First Blood: 20 Years Later 
• Rambo Takes the 80s Part 1
• Alternate Ending
• Outtake
• Saigon Bar Deleted Scene
• The Real Nam (The True Vietnam) 
• Forging Heroes (America’s Green Berets) 
• How to Become Rambo Part 1 
• Sly vs Rambo Interview with Sylvester Stallone 
• Trailers
• Deleted & Extended Scenes

First Blood, while kicking off the Rambo series, is just a distinctly different film than everything that came after it. It’s a slower character piece, focused more on the broken men that fill a post-Vietnam America, rather than on the battles and bombs that would help us regain our confidence in the following decades (that’s for the next addition, where we look into Reagan’s Rambo!).

First Blood is a film that is not afraid to look at how fucked up we all became, towards ourselves and to each other, in those dark years after ‘Nam, and it is that unflinching look, only 5 years after the fall of Saigon, that help make it a great film.