War Machine (2026)

The best part of First Blood isn’t John Rambo blowing things up, escaping into the wilderness, or turning the tables on the cops hunting him. It’s the moment when all of that toughness finally collapses and we see just how badly damaged this guy really is. That has become a major influence on the upcoming John Rambo prequel film, according to star Noah Centineo , and that’s a pretty encouraging sign for anyone hoping the new movie understands what made Rambo such a compelling character in the first place. The Rambo franchise eventually became synonymous with massive guns, explosions, body counts, and Sylvester Stallone looking like he could take down a small army by himself. But the original 1982 film was a different kind of action movie. At its heart, First Blood was about trauma, PTSD, isolation, and what happens when a soldier trained for war comes home to a country that has no idea what to do with him. During an appearance on Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast, Centineo explained that the emotional breakdown between Rambo and Colonel Trautman near the end of First Blood became the guiding point for how he approached the younger version of the character. “What was really important to me and us, it’s one of the last scenes in First Blood when Stallone is with Trautman and he just breaks down. He’s talking about he can’t hold a job and that he’s a war machine, you know, he can fly helicopters but he can’t f*cking park cars. “And then the trauma of his friends being all over and being, you know, ‘he doesn’t have any legs’, right? This is the emotional crux of First Blood and I just looked at that monologue as our North Star. “For me it was important that over the course of this movie the audience viscerally understands the pain that Rambo had gone through to become the monster that he is, that we all have come to know and love.” That’s exactly the kind of foundation a John Rambo prequel needs. By the time audiences meet Rambo in First Blood , he’s already carrying years of pain with him. He arrives in Hope, Washington, as a drifter after learning that one of his fellow soldiers has died. Instead of finding any compassion, Sheriff Teasle decides Rambo doesn’t belong in his town and pushes him out. Things escalate from there, with Rambo suffering abuse at the hands of law enforcement that triggers memories of the torture he endured during the Vietnam War. What follows is violent, but First Blood doesn’t treat Rambo as a simple action hero tearing through bad guys. His actions have consequences, and the movie ultimately forces us to confront the person underneath the survival skills and violence. After spending most of the movie watching Rambo function as an almost unstoppable soldier, we finally see the wounded human being underneath it all. He can operate military equipment and survive situations that would kill most people, but he can’t figure out how to fit back into everyday life. The war followed him home. If John Rambo uses that emotional territory as its foundation, the prequel has an opportunity to show us how he became the man Stallone introduced in 1982 rather than simply giving us a younger Rambo mowing down enemies for two hours. It also sounds like Centineo and director Jalmari Helander understand an important distinction between First Blood and the increasingly over-the-top sequels. Rambo: First Blood Part II and Rambo III pushed the character much further into action-movie superhero territory. They’re entertaining movies and an essential part of Rambo’s pop-culture legacy, but much of the vulnerability that defined the original was pushed aside in favor of bigger missions and bigger firepower. Going back to that vulnerability could give John Rambo some real weight. We already know where this character ends up. The interesting part is discovering what happened to him along the way and watching the experiences that transformed a young soldier into the deeply traumatized veteran wandering into Hope years later. That doesn’t mean the movie needs to skimp on the action. This is still Rambo, and Helander certainly knows his way around brutal action filmmaking. But if the carnage actually means something to the character, it’ll hit a hell of a lot harder. John Rambo is set to open in theaters on June 4, 2027.