More Evidence For Our Continued Underappreciation Of Sylvester Stallone

So I watched Rambo (the recent film) and realized that somehow Rambo has become our modern-day Crusader legend.

John Rambo is an aging knight. That's what the movie is about. That's what Rambo is about. Consider these facts of the recent film (spoilers):

• He guides and protects pilgrims.
  
• The pilgrims travel by sea first, and then over land.
  
• The pilgrims are Christians motivated by religion.
  
• They are told they don't belong in the lands they seek, that they are outsiders and should go home.
  
• They preach to locals when they get there.
  
• They do not approve of their guiding knight's violent methods.
  
• But they need him and end up acknowledging it.
  
• The enemies are heathens: nihilistically evil, rapacious, in some cases homosexual-pedophiliac.
  
• The enemies kidnap innocents (children) for their armies.
  
• The politics of the region are confused, with warring factions, shifting alliances, all hands bloody.
  
• The knight is motivated solely by devotion to one particular Lady.
  
• His love for his Lady is not sexual or romantic, but something else: it is chivalrous.
  

All of this adds up to nothing more or less than a standard chivalry story. All of these aspects were features of standard Grail-quest and similar chivalrous legends from a thousand years ago. Rambo is essentially just a remake of those stories. Although the plot was set in modern-day Thailand (where the journey begins) and Burma (the destination), in all important respects it could just as easily have taken place in 11th-century France and Palestine. (I wonder why from a literary point of view, "holy lands" in these sorts of stories always need to be harsh, inhospitable places; Rambo's adventures take place in dank jungles rather than parched deserts, and nobody going there is seeking any holy person's birthplace, but still, functionally they serve as "holy land" every bit as much as the deserts of the Levant.)

The only thing going against my interpretation, perhaps, is that there's a happy ending and homecoming for the knight, which wouldn't usually be the case, probably. But who would deny Rambo his happy ending after all these years?

Great movie, by the way. Goes right up near the top - if not the top - of my best-of-2008 list. My only (minor in the grand scheme) complaint would be the overuse of obviously digitally-inserted bright red blood/gore splashes, etc...not sure if the overuse was intentional or just that the indie budget didn't allow for cleaning up the effects to make them more subtle, but whatever the case, while one obviously expects gore in a Rambo movie, a little of that stuff would've gone a long way.

Needless to say, though, I had not expected to get such a strong Arthurian undercurrent from such a movie. Now I'm motivated to go back and watch the others to see if the subtext was present there too and I just missed it. It has been a while, after all....

[Originally posted at Rhymes With Cars And Girls]