Rambo III - Peter MacDonald

"Can you not stay?"

-Hamid (Doudi Shoua)

If Rambo I & II were about giving the Vietnam vets their place in American society, Rambo III is about anti-Sovietism. Rambo III is also considerably more violent than its predecessors. In the first two movies, Rambo was on creatine; in the third one, he mixed clenbuterol and nandrolone for breakfast.

Propaganda is useful to assess the mood of a given country in a given age and can have some aesthetic value. No one can seriously deny that Leni Reinfestahl's  movies are impressive and masterfully executed even if they are pieces of Nazi propaganda. The Battleship Potemkin and Alexander Nevsky by Sergei Eisenstein are pieces of art even if they have a clear political agenda in favor of communism.

American propaganda movies do not have a good reputation as far as their aesthetic value is concerned. Part of the reason is that intellectuals -including movie critics- hate liberal democracy, which is a system that rewards the most popular, but not necessarily the smartest. The other part of the reason is that Americans have an inherent bad taste. I mean, what can you wait of the country that came up with the idea hanging around in "flip flops" is normal and even cool? American action movies are vulgar, which is part of their charm. But when you mix vulgarity with a political agenda, it's a little bit too much. 

I defended Rambo I & II based on the values that they tried to convey, as well as on their influence of modern action movies. Rambo III deserves to be watched, if anything, because it is a praise of the Afghan warriors who defeated the Soviet Union with American sponsorship, just to turn against the United States a couple of years later. The romantic description of mujahedeen (مجاهدين), as said by a  tribe's leader when Rambo enters Afghanistan ("warriors who have given their vows to die for god and their land...") has  nothing to do with the idea we have of them today.

Rambo III shows what went wrong with the United States' policy in Afghanistan in particular and with American armed interventions in general. The problem with the US interventions abroad is not, as some critics to the left say, that Americans finance illiberal groups who have the potential to turn against the US (as if these critics actually loved liberalism...). If the Wikileaks papers have shown something is that the US diplomacy has some knowledge of the people it deals with. Americans obviously knew who Osama bin Laden was when they financed his movement in the 1980s. What they didn't know (nobody did, actually) was that the Soviet Union would implode so spectacularly after the Afghan War, creating a vacuum in Central Asia quickly filled by Islamism. If politics is the choice between the lesser of two evils, financing and arming bin Laden was the right choice: containing the Soviet Union was necessary for international security. 

The problem with the US interventions is that Americans don't stay to rebuild the country after wars. Haiti, the Philippines, Afghanistan (in the 1980s), and Iraq, are just a couple of examples of how the US just breaks and leaves. And when they stay, they try to build institutions on the cheap, as the current intervention in Afghanistan shows. Americans are good at financing arms purchases but bad at providing loans or grants to build schools. Rambo III is "dedicated to the gallant Afghan people." I bet that none of the proceeds actually went to build a single roadblock in Afghanistan after the Soviets left. The value of Rambo III is that it shows that the Afghans were just one pawn in the Cold War. Rambo could have fought in Mars. It didn't matter, as long as he fought against the Soviets.

Americans could rebuild Afghanistan after the war. They could have build schools, send Peace Corps volunteers, do something. One of the perversions of American democracy is that the weapons lobby can quickly mobilize Congress to spend billions of dollars on arms purchases, but approving appropriations for international cooperation is painfully slow. 

In an alternate ending, Rambo stays fighting with the the mujahedeen. It would have been a beautiful historic irony that this ending would have been preserved: the icon of American liberty fighting alongside the future terrorists of 9/11...

Here's the trailer of Rambo III:





And you can watch here the speech of Colonel Trautman that Americans forgot between 2001 and 2009. The irony is just total. Sad that the embeddding is disabled.

Rambo: First Blood Part II - George P. Cosmatos

"I'd die for [the United States of America]"

-Rambo (Sylvester Stallone"

The praise of the Rambo saga continues.

The stereotype of Rambo as a violent all-American soldier was actually born with First Blood Part II, the second part of the story. In this movie, Rambo is sent back to Vietnam to collect proofs on the existence of POWs. The government, however, expected Rambo to fail, so it would be able to close the subject.  Marshal Murdock, one of these Washington bureaucrats, is in charge of the mission. Murdock betrays Rambo, showing the double standards of the government regarding POWs. Contrary to Rambo I, where society in general despises veterans, in Rambo II society (or at least the Vets' families) wants the soldiers back home. In both films, the government doesn't really care about the kids it sent to die to South East Asia. In any case, both films focus on the subject of Vietnam War Veterans and their fate after the conflict. The more I think of it, the more I realize that the treatment of veterans would be completely different without Rambo. 

In the original script, the mission is conducted by a group of "civilian contractors" (mercenaries, in plain English), introducing one more element of criticism to the US government military policy. At one point, Cl. Trautman (Rambo's mentor) calls the people in charge of the mission mercenaries, so I guess that the script was not actually polished...

In addition to the vets' related issues, there are two more reasons that make Rambo a movie worth watching:

1. It shows how wrong the US was about the relation of the Soviet Union with the other communist countries.  The movie shows how Vietnam troops were trained and assisted by the Russians. We now have enough evidence that Vietnam did not have good relations with either China or the Soviet Union. The alarming thing was that the conception of a Soviet Union controlling the Asian communist countries prevailed until 1991... (so, conspiracy theorists, you got it wrong once again: the US intelligence services are not that smart, after all)

2. At one point, Rambo II was the movie with most dead people on screen. All the action movies made since 1985 are directly influenced by it. So yes, Rambo is chauvinistic, machista, and it's actually boring after a while. But it's influential...

Here's the trailer:

First Blood - Ted Kotcheff

"I didn't do anything"

-John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone)

Let's put things clear from the beginning: the Rambo saga is not a masterpiece. However, the Rambo movies are still worth watching for a number of reasons that I will explain over the next days. Let's start by First Blood (or "Rambo I", as it is usually known), the first part of the sequel.

Reagan once said that after watching First Blood, he knew exactly what to do with Libya -he bombed one of Moammar Al Qadhafi's personal palaces, in case you were wondering. Given that Libya will be in the media for a couple of months, which is a good leitmotif to talk about the movies.

I will defend First Blood based on two arguments:

1. Rambo shows how the Vietnam veterans were received once the Vietnam War was over. War Veterans are considered heroes in the United States today: they get student loans at lower rates and can get preferential seats in some domestic flights. That was not the case after the Vietnam War. For all the good things that it brought to Earth, the hippie movement failed to see that the kids who went to Vietnam were basically lied about what war was. The Vietnam vets were as alienated as those who escaped the draft. Unfortunately, the lucky ones who didn't fight didn't show any empathy. 

First Blood is a tribute to all those veterans who, in Rambo's words, were "in charge of million dollar equipment in Vietnam but couldn't find a job parking cars" when they came back. The movie is in fact a critique against the establishment, which is why it was successful among teenagers when it was released -it's one of the first movies where an American kills other Americans consciously. From that perspective, it's really sad that Rambo became a symbol of American imperialism and militarism (there's a nerdy explanation about how Reagan changed the meaning of the movie here). 

2. When people think about action movies they have this idea of multi-million dollar productions with ridiculously huge special effects. First Blood received a small budget, even for the standards of its time. However, economic limitations did not prevent it from becoming a tremendous commercial success. Stallone's stunts are better than any special effects: you can see true pain in his face.

And one final thing: there are no really "good" or "bad" characters in First Blood. But the spectator is still forced to make a choice as to whether Rambo or Teasle is right and wrong.

I actually have to revisit the first paragraph of this post: First Blood IS a masterpiece.