John Rambo spent the 1980s knifing, booby-trapping, and exploding his way into the American consciousness. But to resurrect this killer of a character for the 2000s, Sylvester Stallone dug deep into the heart of his hero... and dear God, that heart was dark.

Released in early 2008 to solid box-office success and minimal critical favor, Rambo promised a back-to-basics approach to Stallone's hit action franchise, just as 2006's acclaimed, heartwarming Rocky Balboa had done for The Italian Stallion. Stallone even planned to title the movie John Rambo to make the comparison even more direct, and wound up using that title for the film's longer, more character-driven extended cut. But while the fourth and final film in the Rambo franchise gave Sly's troubled Vietnam veteran a happy ending at last -- its closing shot shows the 60-year-old killing machine returning to his family farm in Arizona for the first time in decades -- it also gives us a character to fear, not root for. This evolution of Rambo as a character and mainstream action franchise, in turn, reveals uncomfortable, disturbing truths about the United States, and after a recent revisit, suggests that our own violent history should be treated with far more nuance than unquestioned cheerleading.

Set in the killing fields of Burma, Rambo is a brutal and bracing revisionist take on a hero whose name is synonymous with mindless action-movie excess, from the man who helped craft that excess in the first place. Yet it's precisely because of its unprecedented savagery that the film feels truer to John Rambo's roots than either of the sequels that preceded it: the movie, this time directed by Stallone, takes the philosophical tensions and fear of warfare present in the franchise since its politically fraught initial installment, loads them into a machine gun, and fires them directly at our collective face. Using all the tools at an old Hollywood hand’s disposal, it reflects the national mood by depicting its angry American as both suffering and inflicting trauma, in as traumatizing a manner as big-budget action movies have ever attempted.

John Rambo made his silver-screen debut in 1982's First Blood, adapted from the David Morell novel of the same name. Set in America's Pacific Northwest, the film features a conflict that's ideologically unthinkable in 2018: soldier vs. cops. Here, Stallone's ex-Green Beret killing machine is just a friendly, soft-spoken vagrant wandering around in a quixotic quest to find the last surviving member of his team from 'Nam, who's succumbed to cancer caused by exposure to Agent Orange. Dejected, homeless, and hungry, Rambo runs afoul of a small-town sheriff (played with welcome nuance by Brian Dennehy), who objects to his unwashed clothes and hippie hairstyle, and tries to chase him out of town. When Rambo resists, the sheriff arrests him on ginned-up charges, only for the thoroughly traumatized vet to escape and systematically take down every cop and weekend-warrior National Guardsman sent to recapture or kill him. The movie ends with Rambo, haunted to the brink of insanity by his memories from the war, sobbing into the arms of his former commander, Colonel Trautman (the franchise's only other recurring character, played by Richard Crenna).