Unreal Rambo finds an
army of fans By Brian McCartan
CHIANG MAI and MAE SOT, Thailand - Rambo
has invaded cinemas worldwide, this time taking
his fight to Myanmar's military regime in Rambo
4. As a violence-packed action flick, the film
predictably delivers; as a window into what is
really happening inside conflict-torn Myanmar, as
the movie's promoters and protagonists have
pitched, this Hollywood spectacle casts a grossly
distorted view.
Searching for a setting
for this latest installment in the Rambo series,
lead actor Sylvester Stallone called on both the
United Nations and Soldier of Fortune magazine for
help in locating the world's hottest current war
zone. He asked, "What is the most under-reported,
most graphic and devastating abuse of human rights
on the planet?" The reply from Soldier of Fortune
was the
60-year-old civil
war being fought by ethnic Karen guerillas against
Myanmar's military junta.
Despite
Stallone's real-life bid to play activist, on the
screen Rambo is what he is: a gruff military
veteran disillusioned with the way he was treated
by the US government after the Vietnam War. With
this movie, however, Stallone tried to go beyond
his well-worn action hero formula and superimpose
the drama of a real war.
Stallone's
numerous comments to the press about Myanmar's
military junta's abysmal rights record - including
challenges to the junta to let him into the
country so that he can show the regime
specifically where and how the abuses are being
committed - has helped to bill the movie as a
fashionable sort of reality film.
Stallone
told the British newspaper The Daily Mail, "I
witnessed the aftermath - survivors with legs cut
off and all kinds of landmine injuries,
maggot-infested wounds and ears cut off. We saw
many elephants with blown-off legs. We hear about
Vietnam and Cambodia, but this was more horrific.
This is a hellhole beyond your wildest dreams. All
the trails are mined. The only way into [Myanmar
from Thailand] is up the river."
The
fourth Rambo movie starts off with documentary
footage - a mix of clips from the August 1988 and
September 2007 popular uprisings against the
regime as well as film taken of the armed conflict
along Myanmar's border with Thailand. The apparent
intent is to set the stage for the rest of the
movie and lend it an air of reality. Those opening
clips, however, are the precise point where
reality stops and fantasy begins.
The
extreme amount of violence in the film trivializes
the actual conflict situation in Myanmar's
war-torn Karen state. According to the Internet
Movie Database, Rambo "has a kill count of 236,
the most for any Rambo film" and that it "averages
2.59 killings per minute". Moreover, the film
thrusts the viewer into a land of make-believe,
where villains are so wicked that they beggar
belief - even in Myanmar.
The initial
scene, wherein ethnic Karen villagers are forced
to run across land-mined rice paddies while
Myanmar soldiers wager on who will make it across
safely, sets the hyperbolic tone for the rest of
the film. While there is extensive documentation
of the Myanmar army's indiscriminate use of
landmines and their use of civilians to walk in
front of them on trails as "human minesweepers",
the situation as portrayed in the movie is
complete fiction, according to human-rights
groups.
So, too, are the scenes where pigs
are allowed to feed on bound and wounded
prisoners' legs. The village massacre scene is
also pure cinematic creation, as wholesale
slaughter of villagers is almost unheard of in
Myanmar. Although villagers are often shot on
sight in the mountains and in their fields, the
army prefers to destroy their villages and starve
them out of the mountains.
According to
human-rights monitors and Karen military officers,
villagers are usually warned in advance by the
rival Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA) of the
approach of Myanmar army columns, giving the
villagers time to flee and certainly preventing
the orgy of violence as portrayed in the film. The
KNLA is also usually able to set up small ambushes
to either deter the army or at least buy time for
the villagers to run.
Lights, camera,
rape The portrayal of a Myanmar army
lieutenant colonel as a homosexual pedophile, who
has young village boys brought to his door at
night by his underlings, only further strains the
film's credibility. One human-rights worker,
documenting the situation in Karen state, noted
that in five years he had heard of only one case
even remotely similar to this. A more realistic
portrayal would have been scenes of Myanmar troops
raping young women and girls.
The shooting
of civilians, including children, the mutilation
of corpses and the gang-rape of women are all well
documented by human-rights organizations,
especially by the Karen Human Rights Group. The
abuses, however, are not perpetrated on the scale
portrayed in the movie, but rather ebb and flow
over a period of months. People are killed in ones
and twos. More children die from treatable
diseases due to lack of medicine than are shot by
the army. Villages are burned and food stocks
destroyed high in the mountains where no outsiders
can bear witness.
The film centers on
Stallone, foreign mercenaries with their token
Asian guy, and Christian missionaries and brushes
over the people who should be the real heroes of
the story - the ethnic Karen. Mercenaries have
only had a very minor role in the struggle of the
various ethnic groups that have fought against the
military regime and most have come as unpaid
adventurers looking for a fight or to pad their
war resume before moving on to paying work in
another Third World conflict.
Meanwhile,
the Karen are portrayed as simple villagers,
completely at the mercy of the Myanmar army; Karen
soldiers are pictured only at the film's tailend
and portrayed as a mere guide and child soldier.
The child soldier is sent away after a few minutes
and the Karen soldier is mercifully taken along
for Rambo's ride - rather than the other way
around. Other than the soldier, who is actually
played by a Thai, there are no Karen-speaking
parts in this reality film.
What the film
does not and should portray are the hundreds of
Karen soldiers and civilians who risk their lives
every day to provide medical and other aid to
their embattled people. While most of the material
aid comes from Western countries or is purchased
in neighboring Thailand, it is taken into Myanmar
and distributed almost exclusively by teams of
local Karen. Very few foreigners venture into the
conflict-ridden mountains of eastern Myanmar, as
mercenaries, missionaries or even as aid workers.
This is doubly disappointing as some of
the documentary footage used at the film's
beginning comes from one of those organizations.
Despite its distortions, Rambo has struck a cord
with many in the exile community - both among
political activist groups and migrant workers,
many of whom saw it through pirate versions
available on the black market or through Internet
downloads before it was released in Thai cinemas.
Even within Myanmar, copies of the film have been
widely circulated, despite a government ban on the
movie and threats of arrest.
Even before
the film, Rambo was a hit with Karen guerillas and
refugees. Several have been nick-named Rambo and
some even have "Rambo" tattooed on their arms. The
previous Rambo movies were often shown at
Manerplaw, the headquarters of the Karen
resistance, until it was overrun by the Myanmar
army in 1995, and in the refugee camps along the
Thai-Myanmar border.
Karen guerrillas are
reportedly fond of some of the quotes from the
latest installment, especially when Rambo grunts,
"Live for nothing, die for something" and the
dialogue sequence, "Are you bringing any weapons?
Of course not. Then you're not changing anything."
One KNLA officer sympathized with the film's
excessive violence, saying, "To compound the 60
years of violence that the Karen have endured into
an hour and a half means the violence has to be
extreme."
Yet if Stallone really wanted to
have a positive impact on Myanmar's people, rather
than cashing in on their plight, some along the
border suggest he could donate a percentage of the
film's proceeds to one or several of the Karen-run
organizations that at great personal risk and on
meager budgets help the people displaced by the
real Myanmar army in the still very real conflict
zone in the mountains of eastern Myanmar.
Brian McCartan
is a Thailand-based freelance journalist.
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