Rambo IV -- War Is In Your Blood


"You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places. All these are the beginning of birth pains."

-- Jesus to His disciples (Matthew 24:6)

Needless to say, there is gratuitous violence in Rambo IV. These are some of the most explosive bullets I have ever heard of... arms, legs and heads flying everywhere.

Yet, somehow, Rambo IV didn't seem excessively unrealistic. The movie was ridiculous, yet not in a bad way. War is ridiculous. We can look back on history and see that war is sometimes necessary, at least from a defensive point of view. But it's still ridiculous.

Just before he goes and takes out an entire battalion of Burmese soldier almost by himself, Rambo says to himself, "You know what you are. What you're made of. War is in your blood. Don't fight it. You didn't kill for your country. You killed for yourself. God's never gonna make that go away. When you're pushed, killing's as easy as breathing."

Rambo IV was written and directed by Sylvester Stallone.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I was shocked when I read the reviews for Rambo - one that stuck out to me was by Alonso Duralde who said, "The film does for the Myanmar genocide what I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry did for same-sex marriage..."

I don't think I could disagree more - while I'm not easily offended, I COULD see why people were offended by racial stereotypes, etc in Chuck & Larry... I found RAMBO to be the complete opposite.

Did it glorify violence a little too much? Probably. But at least it brought attention to the Burma crisis without being overly preachy.

Anonymous said...

Rambo IV as a sequel is much better than the Indiana Jones series. It's may not sound good to compare the two but Rambo remains true to his cause.

One negative point in it however is the attitude of Western filmmakers who think there are problems only outside Hollywood, in fact outside the boundary of the United States. True, the Burmese did have internal conflicts among themselves but they are not as blood thirsty as the film potrayed them.

Laudio said...

I read the "Plugged in Online" review before watching it, and as a result almost didn't watch it.

Zounds! The most violence I've seen in a film (haven't seen some of the classics like "Saving Private Ryan," so I can't compare it to those), and probably more foul language than any other.

But it certainly got me thinking, "They don't really DO that in Burma, do they?" And I'm not sure that I should admit that I thought this was a suprisingly good movie. If the point was to focus attention on genocide in Burma, it's succeeded well with me.