'First Blood's Portrayal of Toxic Authoritarian Power Is Still Relevant After 40 Years

A retrospective look at Ted Kotcheff's classic action film

On this day 40 years ago, Ted Kotcheff’s action film First Blood premiered in theatres all over America. In a retrospective interview, Sylvester Stallone claimed when he first read the script, it was a mess. He liked the idea, but John Rambo, as a protagonist, had no heart. “I didn’t feel any sympathy for the character,” he said. Before the screenplay went through several rewrites, it was his idea to make Rambo a victim instead of a savage. A deeply damaged young man, freshly returned from Vietnam, who wants to get back into society that won’t let him. At its core, this change is what led the character and the movie to become iconic.

In First Blood, Rambo isn’t the character we know today. He hasn’t yet turned into a cartoonish killing machine, a poster boy for right-wing propaganda, and a ruthless action hero the sequels made him in the coming years. He’s just a man who wants to belong and reconnect. That’s one of the two key aspects of why First Blood aged remarkably well and stayed relevant after four decades. The other, unfortunately, is the hostile bullying treatment the protagonist gets from local law enforcement, which is still at large in our culture.

If we disregard the script’s political message about the Vietnam War and PTSD for a moment, we’ll see that Rambo is an accurate representation of the oppressed outcast today. He’s the 80s equivalent of every pariah, every minority, and every discriminated individual ostracized by society.