Movies That Changed Everything...
My first nomination: First Blood (1982).
It's easy to dismiss "Rambo" films due to the sequels but this was the first film that gave VN vets their due and long outstanding respect. And did it 5 years before that Platoon "fairy tale." Here was a film that showed a guy who did his duty but was written off by society anyway because they projected their values onto him.
Martial Arts, back in 82s Stallone studied unarmed combat like few actors before. The escape from the sheriff's office sequence was the closest thing to Bruce Lee choreography that any America actor other than Chuck Norris had ever come close to. The fact that Stallone did it, who really wasn't a martial artists was very impressive.
Serve the red meat, the cliff diving scene along with the self stitching was almost as impactful in 1982 as the beach landing scene in Saving Private Ryan would be decades later. Even the tactics were mostly sound, watching him strip the truck for useful stuff was pretty on the money.
We ain't hunting him...he's hunting us. Sure we had been given some Green Beret lore in previous films, but the ambush sequence in the woods had every wannabe in America buying a Rambo survival knife with a compass in the cap just in case they had to get all VC on the local constabulary. That scene was pure porn for the Soldier of Fortune magazine crowd.
Wasn't that a HK-93? Usually it takes a Michael Mann movie to bring out the exotics, but along with a brief appearance in the beginning of John Carpenter's remake of "The Thing", most of us saw the HK-93 for the first time in First Blood. Of course it didn't matter, you can't shoot what you can't see...."I could have killed them all...I could have killed you...let it go."
Compared to the action military theme films being put out by Arnold at the time, First Blood was Citizen Kane of the genre.
It's hard to be a ACLU hating, philosophically Libertarian, socially liberal, fiscally conservative, scientifically grounded, agnostic, porn admiring gun owner who believes in self determination.
Chuck, we miss ya man.
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