After the
Berlin Wall came down, Rambo retired and the Terminator was reprogrammed. But with Trump in the
White House and Putin in the
Kremlin, they’re back on duty
We live inside the fantasies of old white men. In 2019, with the world in the grip of nostalgic strongmen, it makes sense that cinema would offer us the twin returns of Rambo and the Terminator, musclebound relics of the cold war 1980s. And so in the same stretch of autumn, Sylvester Stallone’s murderous everyman John Rambo has faced down the Mexican cartels in Rambo: Last Blood, with Arnold Schwarzenegger set to save humanity from cyborgs in Terminator: Dark Fate.
It might pass for melancholy – two hugely wealthy actors in their 70s, bodies defiantly racked and pumped, Vladimir and Estragon on protein shakes, grimly refusing to retire. Then again, why would they? A crowd can still be pulled. Their influence runs deep into the present (the entire modern gym industry owes a piece of itself to the Übermensch self-improvement first championed by Schwarzenegger). But for their new movies, the present is not the point, the young are not the audience. The target demographic stretches from those who were teenaged in the 80s to the stars’ generational peer group.