Current Events > Name a franchise as misguided as Rambo

(+) Yeah! (+)

The movie + the book it was based on: the trauma endured by Vietnam veterans, combined with their demonization in public life and their abandonment by the government who drafted them, causes such a lofty toll on them that if they're treated like animals for long enough, they will act like animals. John Rambo's acts of violence aren't glamorous and they aren't heroic - but they are sympathetic when all he is to anyone else is a disgrace and a burden on society, despite simply wanting to leave his trauma behind and to live a normal life. He is a haunted veteran, driven to madness by the dehumanization he's subjected to by those around him.

Rambo 2 and beyond: John Rambo is the ultimate killing machine, and when all conventional infantry - nay, decency - fails to combat the enemy combatant, it falls to John Rambo (the one man army) to take matters into his own hands and save the day, no matter how much it takes.

They turned a harrowing horror story about the traumas of war and the mistreatment of veterans into a jingoistic pro-America army recruitment aid, where the solution to a veteran's incapability to survive in civilian society is to throw them back into war.

yeah but people ate it all up

Wrong Turn

Star wars

yea, I couldn't enjoy the series after the first movie.

the first movie told this complex story, like you said, of a veteran experiencing PTSD, and finding only hostility in a society he was trying to return home to. every act of violence in that movie from his hands was in defense, iirc.

in the sequels, however, he's just this deranged butcher, with him getting more brutal with each new installment. the only reason why the viewer might not see him as a psycho being that the people who he committed those acts against belonged to terrorists, enemy regimes, and/or cartels.

I Know What You Did Last Summer. The original book was a mystery story where none of the characters die. The movie and series adaptations turned it into slashers.

Most franchises are like that. I rarely watch beyond the first movie. Rambo is a particularly egregious example, though, it's true.

Highlander

Fast and Furious

g0ldie posted...

the first movie told this complex story, like you said, of a veteran experiencing PTSD, and finding only hostility in a society he was trying to return home to. every act of violence in that movie from his hands was in defense, iirc.

Probably because the people lived in a dull and boring place.

Also it looked cold and ugly.

Maybe it was the town and people who has PTSD.

makes you think

Smackems posted...

Star wars

I mean, people shat out serials and pulp fiction all the time. Stuff like Flash Gordon is pop art that got vindicated by its audience of idyllistic dreamers who filled in the gaps and got invested in this grand space opera sort of thing. It honestly tracks to me that all three original movies do what they do, introducing so much ludicrous alien bullshit from movie to movie - Jabba the Hutt might feel incongruous with what film nerds consider as the "cinema" of the Empire Strikes Back, but it totally scans that the movies kept throwing random alien bullshit in there like "look, there's a malevolent slug lord who keeps a slave woman on a chain!". All Star Wars is, is a franchise-long homage to pulp fiction.

Even the prequels are justified - since the setting of Star Wars is a galaxy in decline after a rise in intergalactic fascism, and one of the main villains of the original series is eventually painted in a sympathetic light and redeemed for his atrocities, why not show that golden age of the Force and the start of darkness for such an iconic sci-fi villain? There's a story there, and the fall of great civilizations is an interesting topic. The movies might not have been done the best, but it's not wholly misguided to pull on that story thread and see what happens. And I don't begrudge the premise of the sequel trilogy either - there's room for it to exist as a look into the franchise after a generation of peace.

Star Wars came from schlock that sold itself as narrative gold, and so to that mold shall it return. The most misguided part of Star Wars as a franchise is when people began making movies who consider Star Wars itself to be a lifestyle and a personality trait, because that basically fed the poop chute back into the mouth of the beast and led to creative stagnation and cynical pandering. But what are callbacks and further world-building and mythologization of a popular property in the first place, if not shameless pandering and getting high on your own supply? Star Wars comes from schlock at its core, enhanced by the imagination of those who bought into that schlock. I don't see its continued serialisation as something that's at odds with its origins.

Bishop9800 posted...

Fast and Furious

The first movie had a criminal gang shooting magnetised grappling claws into the sides of trucks to steal DVD players. The movies started off as car porn and dumb action schlock, and while it's gotten well beyond a joke how stupid these movies have gotten, the path its taken is congruous with the vision of that original movie.