“This violence contains a movie, but only intermittently.” -Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle.
“Well-shot and well-edited violence porn.” -Mike Thomas of the Chicago Sun-Tribune.
“This time, it’s impersonal.” -Kyle Smith of the New York Post.
Can you guess which one was the negative review? No clicking allowed, especially since Mike Thomas’s review isn’t available online anymore!
Never mind. The point is that Rambo
didn’t do so well with critics. But hey, apparently it’s violence porn. Expecting Rambo to be a critical success would be like betting on Hostel
(33% fresh on the Cream of the Crop section of Rotten Tomatoes) or Saw III
(6% fresh on Cream of the Crop, all of 27% fresh overall) to win the Oscar for Best Picture, right? Movies like Rambo aren’t made for a handful of ivory-tower eggheads who spend their lives mentally masturbating onto the pages of some obscure academic journal that only twelve other people in the whole world even bother to pretend to read; they’re audience movies.
Except Rambo wasn’t exactly a hit at the box office, either. Oh, it got off to a pretty good start despite the reviews — it did more than $18M on its opening weekend here in the US — but then, once people had gotten a look at it, it dropped off a cliff. It cost $50M to make and it didn’t even gross $43M domestic. Ouch!
That’s too bad, because there’s the seed of a really good movie in there.
It starts off with a burnt-out Rambo living in Thailand, making a living capturing snakes for a local tourist attraction and basically avoiding all engagement with other people. Then a group of violence-hating Christian missionaries show up and force Rambo out of his shell. They want to hire him to ferry them upriver into Burma, where they plan to minister to the Karen people, an ethnic minority group which is being brutally oppressed by the military junta ruling the country. Rambo isn’t interested — he tells them that unless they’re bringing the Karen rebels guns, they won’t change a thing — but the group’s lone woman, Sarah (played by Julie Benz) manages to form some kind of tentative connection with him, and he reluctantly agrees. (The actual persuasion scene is by far the worst part of the movie. It wants to convey Rambo’s bitter philosophy and the emotional scar tissue he’s built up over the years, but the dialogue is wincingly awful, and utterly superficial to boot.) Naturally, the missionaries get into trouble soon after he drops them off, and Rambo winds up having to go on a rescue mission with a bunch of mercenaries hired by the church which sponsored the mission.
This setup has the potential to explore the conflict between pacifism and violent reality, the near-impossibility of maintaining any kind of idealism and engagement with the world when nothing you do ever seems to make a damn bit of difference, the necessity of compromise… all of which are deep philosophical issues, and yet deep as they are, these philosophical issues could all be dramatized and made meaningful to millions upon millions of people through the medium of an action movie. That doesn’t sound so much like “violence porn” after all, does it?
The problem is that Stallone left most of those conflicts in the seed stage instead of growing them into complete character arcs and a fully developed story. And this is where the movie would have benefited from a little more ivory-tower eggheadedness, both from a critical perspective and at the box office.
My friend Bill Martell (whose screenwriting blog, Sex in a Submarine, I highly recommend) defines a story as the time when the protagonist has to solve his inner problem in order to solve his outer problem. (Or her inner and outer problems, but since we’re talking about Rambo here, I’ll stick with male pronouns for the rest of this post.) That’s a great definition, because it makes it clear that for a story to work, something in the outer world, some kind of outer problem, forces the protagonist to change in order to successfully deal with it.
For me, this approach to storytelling has always called to mind the Hegelian dialectic, a branch of philosophy designed to make sense of change by breaking it down into three stages: the thesis, or the initial or preexisting state of affairs; the antithesis, an idea or force which contradicts or opposes the thesis; and the synthesis, the resolution of the tension between the thesis and antithesis via mutual negation and transformation*. In screenwriting terms, it’s useful to look at the protagonist at the beginning of the story, or rather at his attitudes and psychological makeup, as the thesis. The antithesis, then, is whatever contradicts or opposes either the protagonist’s approach to life or what he stands for, and the conflict between them forms both the narrative arc of the story and the character arcs of the protagonist and whichever characters embody the antithesis.
Most people would probably assume that the antagonist is the antithesis, but that’s often not the case. In Rambo, the villain is the head of the local Burmese military detachment, the guy responsible for all the torturing, raping and killing we see, and also the guy who abducts Sarah and her fellow missionaries and feeds one of them to a bunch of hungry pigs. (And no, it’s not a pretty sight.) But he’s not the antithesis. In the beginning of the movie, Rambo’s approach to dealing with the horrors of the world is to disengage and avoid, and up to this point, it’s been effective as far as it goes. The antithesis to disengagement from horror, though, isn’t more horror, it’s engagement with horror, fighting against horror and trying to do something about it. In other words, Sarah is Rambo’s antithesis, and not just because she wants to go to Burma and help the Karen people while he thinks she’s wasting her time, but also because she’s resolutely non-violent while he’s, well, Rambo.
It’s the tension between these two very different approaches to life which forms the story, and we expect both characters to grow and change by the time the end credits roll. Obviously, Rambo is moved to action by Sarah’s plight, and in the end he should realize that he really can make a difference by helping the Karen rebels defeat the Burmese military. And Sarah, presumably, should rethink her absolute, categorical no-exceptions-ever-no-matter-what opposition to violence once she realizes that some people truly are nothing more than monsters and that she and her fellow missionaries (not to mention a whole bunch of innocent Karen people) would have died if not for the violent measures Rambo took to save them.
Unfortunately, Stallone didn’t properly dramatize either character arc, and he gave Sarah’s particularly short shrift. There’s a moment in the climactic battle against the military when Michael, one of the other missionaries (played by Paul Schulze) grabs a rock and bashes in an enemy soldier’s head, but it feels cheap, because the movie didn’t lay much of a foundation for his change of heart, and more importantly, it makes the problem with Sarah even more glaringly obvious, because after her initial platitudes, we never get much of a sense of what her attitude towards violence (or towards its personification, Rambo) has become. She should have changed over the course of the story, and her evolution should have formed her character arc and helped mold both Rambo’s arc and the steps of the plot, but instead she played very little part in the story beyond being a damsel in distress.
Here’s one example. There’s a great scene early on when Rambo and the missionaries are in his boat heading upriver towards Burma. They run into some pirates, and just before the pirates draw their weapons and start shooting (and kidnapping and raping and torturing and god knows what else) Rambo pulls a gun and kills them all. The missionaries, of course, are horrified, and Rambo naturally wants to turn around and go home… but then the scene shoots itself in the foot. Michael is outraged, but Sarah tells the other missionaries that if they go back, the killing will have been in vain, and she puts her hand on Rambo’s arm and gently persuades him to finish the trip. The problem is that this doesn’t create conflict between Rambo and Sarah, and it doesn’t advance the theme of the story or generate movement in their character arcs, either. Nor does it make a whole lot of sense. Michael already regards Rambo as a disgusting and irredeemable sinner; he should have been the one to coldly insist that Rambo discharge his mission and bring them to Burma so that the deaths of the pirates won’t be completely pointless. Sarah, by contrast, who’s felt some kind of connection to Rambo, who’s had some degree of belief that there’s something worthwhile buried within him, and yet whose pacifism truly comes from the heart, should have been horrified and repulsed. Instead of calmly touching his arm, a gesture of attraction, she should be at the far end of the boat, pressed up as far away from Rambo as she can get, and deep down, Rambo should be hurt by her rejection.
In the end, however, she should be the one to accept the necessity of violence, at least in some circumstances, not Michael. (Though maybe not through actually bashing in someone’s head, since that runs the risk of feeling cliched and obvious.) By the same token, though, Rambo should realize that violence isn’t the whole answer. Yes, it’s necessary sometimes, but he should finally acknowledge that the sort of work that the missionaries want to do — bringing medicine and education to the villagers, for example — is just as important. The simplest way to establish this would be for Rambo to see how much the missionaries’ work means to the Karen villagers; he could form a bond with some of them and decide to stay in Burma and continue helping them after defeating the evil Burmese military guy. (After all, they didn’t wipe out the whole Burmese army, just a relative handful of soldiers and one psychotic leader among many, so the troubles of the Karen people are hardly over.) Instead, we get a complete non sequitur in the form of a coda in which he walks up to his father’s house, having abandoned the rebels and returned home to the US, bang, the end. What does that have to do with reengaging with the world and taking a not-always-violent stand against evil? Absolutely nothing.
A large part of the problem is that nobody involved with the film seemed quite sure what they wanted to do with the relationship between Sarah and Rambo. At times it seems like there’s a potential romantic attachment forming between them, but it never goes anywhere, and at other times it actually looks like she might already be involved with Michael, who’s the head of the missionary group. Perhaps people were nervous about the age difference between Stallone and Julie Benz, but if that was the case, they should have just cast someone a little older in the role of Sarah, because a genuine romantic connection between them would have made the Hegelian dialectic formed by their conflicting worldviews much more personal and deeply felt. Their attraction to each other would have symbolized the fact that his tendency to violence as a first resort and her naive but idealistic pacifism needed to mate with each other, figuratively speaking, and create something new and improved. Separately, they were incomplete and flawed human beings, but together, they would have been freed of each of their individual weaknesses, and as a result they would have been far more capable of dealing with both the threat of the Burmese military and the needs of the Karen people than either of them were alone. They needed each other, in other words.
Anyway, it was certainly fun seeing Rambo back on the big screen and kicking some evil ass, but imagine how much more satisfying this alternate version of the movie would have been. He would have finally, truly defeated his inner demons, he would have made a real and lasting difference in the world, and as a result, he would have finally gotten the girl and ended his long monk-like exile from everyday human society. I don’t know about you, but I’d have bought that movie on Blu-Ray instead of just renting it from Netflix, and I’m sure it would have made much more money at the box office too.
*(I’m simplifying, of course, and Hegel himself actually never espoused the model which bears his name; in fact, he opposed this sort of analysis entirely, though it is based in large part on his work, but that’s another subject entirely.)
Tags:
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Character Arc,
Despair,
Hegel,
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Hostel,
Inner Conflict,
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Saw III,
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