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Finding Rambo

Peter Chattaway has posted and ruminated on a montage of clips collected by AICN of John Rambo, Sylvester Stallone's upcoming installment in the Rambo series. See the video at Chattaway's site or here.

Chattaway notes how the extremely violent clips are juxtaposed against overt religious content and asks what it all means:

Is the juxtaposition of the violence with the so-called Prayer of St. Francis nothing more than irony, or do these things represent opposites that can and must be reconciled? Is faith like the woman in a typical Western -- a voice of pacifism and civility that is fine and good and has its place, but which the hero must ignore, when push comes to shove, in order to rid the world of evil? Or will Rambo come to repent of all the violence which the film so clearly delights in depicting -- and if so, how could such a plot twist make a deeper impression on the viewer than these rather visceral images? Or is it possible that the film will bring faith and violence together, and show how one gives its imprimatur to the other? The trailer doesn't seem to point that way, but you never know ...

This film is of interest to this blog not only because of the religious themes and plot (it follows a group of missionaries who go into Burma) but also because of the God talk Sly's been exhibiting. After these clips, I'm not sure I'll see the film (the violence is just too much for me these days), but there's a big part of me that wishes I could. Stories of genocide need to be told and perhaps Sly's the one to get Burma's into the mainstream. To borrow from Chattaway, "you never know . . ."

(Images: copyrighted by Lionsgate Entertainment; via rainakani at ramboiv.moonfruit.com)