Rambo: First Blood

Factual error: Col. Trautman should be wearing his rank insignia on the flash (small patch) on his beret. All officers wear their rank on their flash, enlisted men wear the unit crest. (This error was corrected in Rambo II and III.)

Factual error: The military cannot be used to help execute civilian law except during emergencies. Rambo could, I guess, be considered an emergency however, once the national guard was called out, they would have had jurisdiction over the Podunk police department. When Brian Denehy told them to wait for them, and then subsequently to clean up their mess, he would not have been in charge at that point.

Cinderdan

Factual error: In the scene in the police station, where Rambo was about to get shaved, he had a flashback of the vietcong guy slicing his chest up. The vietcong guy was noticeably speaking Cantonese instead of Vietnamese.

Factual error: The state police cars have light bars that show blue on the left and red on the right. In real life, the light bars would be red on the left and blue on the right.

Continuity mistake: In the scene when the gas station blows up, watch the cars parked in front of the "Kool Lights" advertisement. These two cars explode (for no obvious reason, by the way) after the police officers have gotten out of their cars. They run away from the explosion and leave their police cars behind. Next shot, the same two cars in front of the ad explode again.

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Trivia: In the introduction to the 1988 Hodder Headline edition of the novel First Blood, author David Morrell says that he got the name Rambo from both a variety of apple, and the writer Rimbaud: "A French author's name and the name of an apple collided, and I recognized the sound of force."

J I Cohen

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Question: I actually have two questions about this film. Firstly, does Rambo actually kill anyone in this film? Dennehy doesn't die and he didn't kill Galt so was there anyone else? And secondly when Rambo arrives at the cliff face, why didn't he simply run to his right or left? The police were only coming at him from behind (and even if one of them came from the side, Rambo could have used his skills to get past him). So why did he feel that going down the cliff was his only option?

Gavin Jackson

Chosen answer: No he doesn't kill anyone. He didn't know if he was surrounded or not and if he did encounter one from the side they might have shot him.

Grumpy Scot

Rambo killed Galt, albeit indirectly and unintentionally. In the US, "manslaughter involves causing the death of another person in a manner less culpable than murder." Rambo was responsible for throwing a projectile that struck the helicopter, causing the pilot to lose control resulting in Galt falling to his death.

But if Galt had been buckled in, he'd have lived. He was behaving recklessly. Yes Rambo's rock was involved, but that's two steps removed from Galt's death. Rock thrown -> pilot overreacts -> Galt falls because he wasn't strapped in properly. Galt's own behaviour and the pilot's reaction are more at fault than Rambo. This isn't a court, by most reasonable standards Rambo didn't kill Galt.

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