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  • Adaptation Displacement: ...not that many people had even heard of the novel.
  • Aluminium Christmas Trees: Rambo being arrested for vagrancy seems like Disproportionate Retribution today, but it was legitimately a criminal offence in the post-Vietnam years. The novel includes a "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer in the foreword of more recent editions. In 1983, the Supreme Court would find such "Vagrancy" laws unconstitutionally vague in Kolender v. Lawson, ruling that they were essentially blank checks to let local law enforcement arrest almost anyone they wanted to, like in this movie.
  • Anvilicious: War is traumatic. The film manages to be somewhat restrained about this theme until Rambo's monologue at the end hammers the point home in explicit detail. Roger Ebert called this out in his review, saying that Rambo was more compelling when his inner conflict was implied rather than spelled out.
  • Award Snub: Sylvester Stallone, Brian Dennehy and Richard Crenna all deserved Academy Award or Golden Globe nods for their excellent performances. Jerry Goldsmith's brilliant score also deserved the same recognition. This movie got none of them.
  • Awesome Music:
    • "It's a Long Road" by Dan Hill. It's as beautiful as it is hauntingly dreary.
    • The score by Jerry Goldsmith is awesome.
  • Catharsis Factor: Despite being somewhat Played for Drama, watching Art Galt fall to his death was in a way satisfying, especially after watching him sadistically torment Rambo and try to kill him. To top it all off, he’s the only confirmed character to die in the movie.
  • Ensemble Dark Horse: Colonel Trautman was such a beloved supporting character that he was the only returning cast member in the sequels other than Rambo himself.
  • Evil Is Cool: Sheriff Teasle can be considered to be this by some due to more exceptional depth characterization unlike the future villains, showing off some Villainous Valor and his actor's grounded performance.
  • First Installment Wins: First Blood is widely agreed to be the best film in the Rambo series.
  • Fridge Brilliance: Due to Trautman's Korean War service as stated in All There in the Manual, aside from his Vietnam service and Teasle's Korean War service, one has to think why Teasle has a better relationship with Trautman despite Trautman's Vietnam service (that Teasle dislikes in others like Rambo), is probably because Teasle saw Trautman as a fellow Korean War veteran kindred spirit to get along better than sole Vietnam vets.
  • Germans Love David Hasselhoff:
    • The film was enormously successful in Turkey. In Istanbul, one of the major cinemas of the city showed this film for over 50 weeks, despite strong rivals such as Shogun playing at the same time.
    • The film was also very popular in China, being one of the first Hollywood blockbusters to be released in the country. It sold 76 million tickets there, a record for an American film which lasted until 2018.
  • Harsher in Hindsight: Brian Dennehy as Teasle and his hatred against Vietnam vets can be hard to swallow to some, considering Dennehy in real-life had lied about serving in Vietnam while in the military and later apologized for the fraud.
  • He Really Can Act: This is commonly regarded as one of Sylvester Stallone's best performances, particularly the ending breakdown.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight:
    • There’s a number of fans who jokingly say Mitch changed his name to Horatio Caine and got a transfer to Miami.
    • "In town, you're the law; out here, it's me." So, what Rambo's basically saying here is "I AM THE LAW!"
  • Iron Woobie: Rambo himself. The film opens with him finding out that an old friend has passed away from Agent Orange poisoning, and it just gets worse from there. All he wants is to get something to eat before moving on to the next town, but he ends up arrested for vagrancy and assaulted by the police, escapes into the mountains wearing only a tank top in the middle of winter, and becomes the victim of a violent manhunt after repeatedly trying to de-escalate the conflict. It's not hard to feel sorry for him.
  • Jerkass Woobie: In the DVD's director's commentary, Teasle is said to be this due to him having served in the Korean War, which has been forgotten and harbours prejudice and jealousy towards Rambo due to the Vietnam War being a hot topic at the time this film was set and the fact he was highly decorated more than Teasle himself (Rambo was awarded the Medal of Honor, while Teasle was awarded a Silver Star, Purple Heart and ADSC, which Teasle is implied to consider them inferior to the more well-regarded Medal of Honor). Even though he is genuinely grief-stricken at his so-called best friend Galt's death and wants to avenge him, he is completely oblivious that his friendship with him is absolutely one-sided due to Galt's despicable nature and even purposely ignoring Teasle at the time of his death; it's also implied that Galt may have manipulated Teasle to be friends just for Teasle to get Galt a job that lets him continue committing heinous crimes and getting away with it. Also, despite being a somewhat loathsome antagonist, he's not really an evil villain, just a broken, misguided, angry soul and is rounded up as human and fallible. Teasle proved that he had the basic decency to be able to acknowledge that he may have been in the wrong, and was more misguided and overzealous than actively malicious until Galt's death whereupon he was emotionally compromised and was clearly acting irrationally. Although his actions are clearly in the wrong, he committed them out of a misguided sense of being right and in an emotionally compromised state. It's made more explicit in the novel with Teasle's Woobie status up to eleven, as novel reveals his wife had divorced him, worsening his angst, while it is also revealed that Teasle's father was killed in a hunting trip.
  • Memetic Mutation: NOTHING IS OVER! NOTHING! More specifically, Stallone's melodramatic and almost incomprehensible delivery of the whole speech.
  • Moral Event Horizon: Art Galt crosses it when he recklessly shoots at Rambo without giving a shit about his own safety or that of the rest of the police department and actually threatens to kill the chopper pilot if he doesn't fly the chopper right. Coupled with his Police Brutality towards Rambo back in jail, this cements Galt to be a definite Dirty Cop, perhaps more so then Teasle.
  • Narm:
    • David Caruso's screams of pain when he gets stabbed in the leg. This was immortalised in Golden Axe.
      "AAOH, GAAAaaaAAAaaaHHHDDD!"
    • The part when the asshole deputy Art Galt dies has a bit of Fridge Humor: He's falling in slow motion but screaming at regular speed. So, does that mean he was squealing like a chipmunk on the way down? His screams too were sampled for use in Golden Axe.
  • Narm Charm: Sobbing Johnny Rambo recounting his traumatic 'Nam experience (making even hardass Richard Crenna's lip tremble) is a Tear Jerker source, but the enunciation leaves something to be desired, occasionally hard to make out of what he's saying. Given the circumstancesnote  and the way it reveals The Dreaded is a suffering Shell-Shocked Veteran, it can also be said that's exactly what makes the scene so impactful.
  • Nightmare Fuel:
    • The flashbacks Rambo has of his time as a POW are pretty disturbing. He was strung up by rack that strangled him, and slowly carved across the chest with a huge knife, making him scream in pain. And it's implied that all of those scars were from the same knife, so that flashback was just the first cut. No wonder he freaked out.
    • Rambo just seems like a tired, broken and sad veteran of a war that put him through hell. Then Teasle's boys set off his PTSD with their Police Brutality so hard that he snaps, waging a one-man war that cripples several of them as an unnerving and frankly terrifying individual that none of them can hope to stop. Were it not for being a Technical Pacifist (and the one death he causes being accidental), he could've killed them all with next to no effort, and they wouldn't have seen it coming. A horrific display of a shattered soldier's mindset versus any ordinary individuals.
  • Retroactive Recognition:
  • Signature Scene: Rambo's emotional breakdown.
    • When Rambo ambushes the deputies and gives them all non-lethal wounds. No reason to believe the events aren’t happening in real-time and it takes him three minutes to take out eight armed men. While previous events made it clear that he was well trained, it’s from this moment on that you realize he’s a killing machine when he wants to be.
  • Spiritual Adaptation: Cracked claimed in its article that the film adaptation of First Blood was an adaptation of the 1962 film Lonely Are the Brave, which was itself an adaptation of the 1956 novel The Brave Cowboy. Composer Jerry Goldsmith providing the score for both films and Kirk Douglas being originally cast as Trautman further adds to this.
  • Suspiciously Similar Song: The film's song "It's a Long Road" resembles the song from Lady Snowblood "The Flower of Carnage" sung by Meiko Kaji.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Teasle would have been an interesting complex Jerkass Woobie character like in the novel the film is based on and the most unique antagonist in the Rambo films, but he's instead reduced to a little characterized Big Bad as shown in the final cut. There's also the fact that he never appears again, despite implicitly surviving this film's events. Also, Dennehy's real-life passing also destroys any chance for the character to reappear again if given.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
    • Teasle's motive behind his vendetta against Rambo for being a Vietnam vet, as the Vietnam War virtually erased the existence of Korean War vets in the public eye as well as his Jerkass Woobie status with more Pet the Dog moments should have been explored more like in the novel.
    • The plot of old-fashioned Korean War tactics versus modern Vietnam War guerrilla warfare (as it has been showcased in a few scenes like the climax's showdown part) could have been given a lot of depth to show contrasting military-training comparisons between veterans Rambo and Teasle.
  • Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: The original ending where Rambo dies did not test well with audiences because of this trope thanks to Rambo's more sympathetic portrayal, so it was revised to prevent this by having Rambo live. With the film as bleak as it is, it's hard to blame them.
  • Unintentional Period Piece: The film's exploration of society's treatment of war veterans is timeless, but one thing that stands out is Rambo being arrested for "vagrancy", a crime which was struck down as unconstitutional in the 1983 Supreme Court case Kolender v. Lawson, which found such crimes to be overly vague to the point that they gave the police excessive powers, a point that the film itself highlights.
  • Values Dissonance: Rambo's infamous end-movie rant includes the long-debunked "War protesters spitting on returning veterans" and "They wouldn't let us win" narratives propped up by warhawks and opponents of the Antiwar movement.
  • Values Resonance: While this certainly wasn't ignored during its initial release, the message about PTSD in veterans was sometimes dismissed as melodramatic by critics, especially the scene where Rambo unloads all of his trauma from the war at Trautman. Now, the film is often praised for its fairly accurate portrayal of PTSD, and the early criticisms are now seen as an example of Men Don't Cry.
  • Vindicated by History: The film received mixed reviews in 1982, but critical opinion of it has grown more favorable over the years when compared to its more actionized and less thematically-complex sequels. The Values Resonance of the unusually sympathetic and accurate portrayal of PTSD helps as well. And while Stallone did not get any awards for his performance, it is now seen by many as his best performance ever.

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