David Morrell
1972
Grand Central Publishing.
Cheating again. This one is for a research project.
First of all, the film Rambo and the novel Rambo are two completely different people with two completely different motivations in two completely different settings.
Novel Rambo would just as soon cut your face off as look at you. Film Rambo only kills in self defense.
Film Rambo wants to save you.
Novel Rambo wants to kill you.
Film Rambo kills owls for supper.
Novel Rambo jumps on a pig with a stick.
(Pork or owl... you tell me which you'd rather have.)
Film Rambo has a shirt, jeans, and some shoes when he escapes... subsequent body count: 1.
Novel Rambo goes into the woods completely naked... subsequent body count: innumerable.
Film Teasle is an asshole.
Novel Teasle is an emotionally underdeveloped asshole.
Film Trautman is compassionate.
Novel Trautman is a self-replicating killing machine.
The film speaks to the injustice of war and the intolerable treatment of returning veterans in post-Vietnam USA. Only the deserving suffer. There is a clear distinction between good and evil.
The novel brings the hell of war to small-town Kentucky. Nobody wins, everybody loses, and the innocent suffer more than the deserving, and in the middle of this war, the community is destroyed and shit gets wrecked from A to Z. Ambiguous lines of good and evil dominate the novel to the point that even the ink is gray.
The second film has a completely different tone, and the third is almost a parody of the action genre. The second and third films are as germane to First Blood (both the film and the novel) as Leaving Las Vegas is to Scary Movie 3.
They're in completely different realms of intention, and tone.
The novel, though, is well-written. Morrell studied literature and it shows. The way Morrell structured the novel is supremely effective when one is trying to create a binary between to forces. Each chapter is written from an alternating point of view. While the ambiguity of moral values increases, so does the character development. There are no cliched plot conventions or eye-rolling deus ex machina saviors in the novel-- it was crafted by a master who took his time and knew what he was doing.
The novel has much more to offer the reader than the film does (obviously). If I had read First Blood before seeing the film, I would've been terribly disappointed. Not necessarily because the film didn't tell the story as well, but because the film tells a story which is almost completely absent all of the elements which made then novel so effective.
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Novel Rambo would take pleasure in guttin' you, boy.
Novel Rambo would take pleasure in guttin' you, boy.
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