_ By Jim McNalis

The new RAMBO ought to scare the beegeebies out of the regime. If Rambo can annihilate an entire battalion of Burmese soldiers and their marine fleet nearly single handedly , just imagine what the U.S. 7th fleet could do by steaming up the Irrawaddy into Rangoon. I’ll bet pirated copies of this new Stallone film are the hottest ticket in Myanmar today.

I viewed the film at an early screening today with mixed reactions. Before seeing it I read that Stallone described it as “like Beyond Rangoon with rockets”. This film has it’s good points but it is no Beyond Rangoon. John Boorman mounted a thriller in order to bring the Burma story to the vast audiences of multiplex theatres. Stallone has used the Burma nightmare to focus on the steroid pumped, super hero at age 61. Where Burma is the star of Beyond Rangoon, Stallone’s ego is the star of RAMBO.

That is not to say this is a bad thing. As you know by now, the story is quite simple. Rambo is discovered living in nihilistic isolation in Thailand. He accepts a job to run some missionaries up the river and into Burma then is moved to return to save them when they are kidnapped by the Tatmadaw. All of this takes place in the absolutely glorious landscapes of northern Thailand. But after the set-up it is pretty much over-the top violence all the way. The carnage near the end is so extra human that it requires a bonanza of CGI and 3D animation to show the audience what happens to the human body as the target of high powered guns, rockets, mines, arrows etc. 

I believe the film will bring some awareness of the atrocities in Burma to an audience that will not find it any other way.
It probably will increase the paranoia of the more superstitious and unstable members of the regime.

During the film I became aware of the absence of an atmospheric and well composed soundtrack. One of the main features of Beyond Rangoon is the truly brilliant compositions by Has Zimmer in reinforcing the exoticism of the locales and the tension of the action and escape. Rambo is neither helped nor hindered by what sounds like generic suspense/heroism/inspiration music.

I am still waiting for a more intelligent film that deals with any of the abundance of great and thrilling stories both inside the country and along its border. The atrocities visited on the people of Burma, and especially the Karens, by the regime are so horrifying and inhuman, that no film needs violence and special effects to compete with the reality if the situation.

I am very excited by the prospect of “The Lady” a film dealing with Aung San Suu Kyi (from 1988 to the present) by the director of Cinema Paradiso, Giuseppe Tornatore.  Also it sounds as if the one woman stage show of “The Lady of Burma” by Richard Shannon (available in paperback by Oberon Modern Plays) is a winner.

So like freedom and democracy in Burma, the great movie about the subject has yet to be realized.  

We wait.