First Blood is a 1982 American action film directed by Ted Kotcheff and co-written by Sylvester Stallone, who stars as Vietnam War veteran John Rambo.

Since its release, it has been reappraised by critics with many highlighting the roles of Stallone, Dennehy and Crenna, and recognizing it as an influential film in the action genre.

Ignoring Teasle's instructions to wait for his arrival, the guardsmen fire a rocket launcher, collapsing the mine entrance and seemingly killing Rambo.

Teasle furiously berates the guardsman for disobeying his orders and demands that their leader Clinton Morgan dig out Rambo’s body.

However, Rambo survives the attack, where he escapes the mine through a ventilation shaft, hijacks a military truck carrying an M60 machine gun and ammunition and returns to Hope to cause as much damage as possible in revenge.

Rambo vents about the horrors of war and his traumatic experiences like watching his friends give their lives in Vietnam, being treated poorly when returning home, being unable to hold a job and being forgotten despite his sacrifices.

Rambo breaks down crying as he recounts how a good friend was killed by a Viet Cong child soldier using a shoeshiner box wired with explosives.

After being comforted by a visibly disturbed Trautman, Rambo surrenders and is taken into federal custody, while Teasle is taken to a waiting ambulance for transport to the hospital.

The film would have ended with Teasle ordering his men to drop their guns to try to reason with Rambo, who would have then been fatally shot by an unknown assailant.

[citation needed] Afterward, John Calley purchased the rights at Warner Bros. Pictures for $125,000 with the thought of casting either Robert De Niro or Clint Eastwood as Rambo.

William Sackheim and Michael Kozoll wrote the screenplay that would be the basis of the final film in 1977, originally intending for John Badham to direct.

[6] After Mario Kassar and Andrew G. Vajna of Anabasis Investments read the book, they got interested in doing an adaptation as the first production of their studio Carolco Pictures funded by "in-house sources".

The time since the end of the Vietnam War and Stallone's star power after the success of the Rocky films enabled him to rewrite the script to make the character of John Rambo more sympathetic.

Brooks originally wanted to cast Bette Davis as a psychiatrist and either Burt Lancaster or Lee Marvin as Sheriff Teasle.

[12] Rabe developed his screenplay with Al Pacino in mind for the role and had several conversations with the actor, who wanted to portray Rambo as a force of nature after seeing the film Jaws.

[10][13][14] When Badham was considered as director he wanted to cast John Travolta as Rambo, George C. Scott as Trautman, and either Gene Hackman or Charles Durning as Teasle.

Frankenheimer considered Powers Boothe, Michael Douglas, and Nick Nolte as Rambo before casting Brad Davis because of his role in Midnight Express.

[15] For the role of Sheriff Teasle, Kassar and Vajna approached Academy Award winners Hackman and Robert Duvall but both turned the part down.

[18][19][7] Since the production ran over schedule, Crenna's role in the film was cut in order to avoid having to pay him higher fees as specified in his contract.

[23] Kassar and Vajna sought either Warner Bros. 20th Century Fox, or Paramount Pictures as a distributor, displaying an 18-minute promotional reel to studios.

The album was reissued on CD with one extra track ("No Power") twice, first as one of Intrada Records's initial titles, then as an identical release by Varèse Sarabande.

The complete score was released by Intrada in a 2-CD set, along with a remastered version of the original album (with the Carolco logo [previously released on La-La Land Records's Extreme Prejudice album] and the Rambo: First Blood Part II trailer music added), on November 23, 2010, as one of their MAF unlimited titles.

In his review, Roger Ebert wrote that he did not like the film's ending, but added it was "a very good movie, well-paced, and well-acted not only by Stallone ... but also by Crenna and Brian Dennehy."

[32] The New York Times film critic Janet Maslin described Rambo as a "fierce, agile, hollow-eyed hero" who is portrayed as a "tormented, misunderstood, amazingly resourceful victim of the Vietnam War, rather than as a sadist or a villain."

The site's critics consensus reads, "Much darker and more sensitive than the sequels it spawned, First Blood is a thrilling survival adventure that takes full advantage of Sylvester Stallone's acting skills.

[46] In the 2010 edition of his Movie Guide Leonard Maltin gave the film one-and a half stars out of four, saying that it "throws all credibility to the winds about the time [Rambo] gets off with only a bad cut after jumping from a mountain into some jagged rocks".

[48][49][50] In a 2011 article for Blade Magazine, by Mike Carter, credit is given to Morrell and the Rambo franchise for revitalizing the cutlery industry in the 1980s due to the presence of the Jimmy Lile and Gil Hibben knives used in the films.

[51] A writer from the American think tank Foundation for Economic Education commented that the sequence of events in the film are the result of police brutality.

He assigned blame to Teasle's actions and compared the situation to a number of twenty-first century police encounters that turned deadly.

Mayor Peter Robb, Canadian Member of Parliament Mark Strahl, and the statue's sculptor, Ryan Villers, attended the ceremony.