Commandomovieswere very popular in the U.S. in the late 70's and throughout the 80's. Movies were the main way the U.S. dealt with the Vietnam War trauma. When you really think about it, making entertainment movies is a very weird catharsis, but I guess different peoples deal with their tragedies in different ways.
Aliens is, among other things, a metaphore about Vietnam: a group of elite soldiers with sophisticated technology enter a hostile territory thinking they will wipe out the enemy in less than 5 minutes, just to discover that their rival is infinitely superior to them.
So, according to that, and contrary to its predecesor, Aliens is an action movie, though the horror component is still there. Aliens has rightfully been praised as a 2-hours shot of action, and is actually one of the best movies of the genre. The negative side is that Aliens banalized the omnipresent and ruthless monster of the first part. In the first part, one alien killed seven people in less than 24 hours; in this part, an entire army of aliens were not able to enter a compound defended by 5 people, one of which was a little girl.
Aliens (and its behind-the-scenes) is a movie worth watching mostly for prospective movie-makers. In light of the special effects available today, modern audiences may not feel as thrilled about its action scenes, and the gore scenes, though impacting back in the day, would make it to a PG-13 movie today.
Few movies have generated an opinion as unanimous as Apocalypse Now: everybody loves this movies, but few people really know why. Anti-war people like Apocalypse Now because they think it has an anti-war message, while other people think its plot is basically a glorification of violence. In fact, Apocalypse Now is an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. It is unclear what is Coppola's intended message with this movie, but I'd like to think that he's only trying to portray war "as it is": soldiers executing orders and just trying to go back home. Remarkably, international politics is mostly absent in the original movie (the 2001 Redux does include discussions on politics and colonialism).
Another remarkable thing of Apocalypse Now is its music: The Doors, the Rolling Stones and Wagner are the main stars.
I recommend Apocalypse Now because it's become a cultural icon, but I have to acknowledge that I still haven't digested it; I will probably have to watch it 2 or 3 times before I get the entire message. The "first act" is great, mixing Catch-22 like scenes with dark humor and (at the time) extremely violent scenes, all of which result in an excellent portrait of the ridiculousness of war. The "second act" is, I think, a failed psychological thriller: we still see an photographer (thoday, he'd be an NGO-kind-of guy) gone mad worshipping a serial killer, but there are some redundant silences and scenes.
Taxi Driver is one of the most revered movies in the United States. Winner of the Palme d'Or, and selected to be preserved as in the U.S. National Film Registry in 1994, Taxi Driver has been interpreted mostly as a movie about loneliness. In a way, Taxi Driver is also the father (or mother?) of movies like Kill Bill, Sin City, and basically any other movie about antiheros you can think about.
I recommend Taxi Driver because of its artistic value, but also because it shows, like most of the movies I talk about in this blog, how the World has changed in such a short period of time (Taxi Driver was filmed in 1976!). Here are some examples:
Had it been filmed after 9/11, Taxi Driver would have spent most of the time showing Travis Bickle planning how to circumvent the security of Senator Palantine. Instead, we see his psychological evolution from a lonely-but-sensitive-guy to a crazy vigilante. The end of the movie would be totally different today. In the 70's people thought that redemption was a possibility in the secular World. Today, only believers in the after-life believe in redemption. The rest of humanity knows that redemption doesn't actually exist. There is no chance in hell that a 13-year-old girl would be representing the role of a... 13-year-old girl in a R-rated movie today. Jodie Foster's particiipation in Taxi Driver is the equivalent of Nabokov's Lolita in the movies.
Taxi Driver also shows what a great actor Robert de Niro was. Why he decided to pass from doing cool stuff like Taxi Driver to Meet the Fockers (and Little Fockers) is one of the biggest mysteries to me. What a way to destroy a legacy...
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.
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...
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.
is about 
and 
by 
, the second part of the story. In this movie, Rambo is sent back to Vietnam to collect proofs on the existence of 
(or "Rambo I", as it is usually known), the first part of the sequel.