John Rambo ... has been pussified

I was going to use this post to write about Fallout 3, a game I have some gripes with, but, something has recently got my proverbial goat, so it looks like that particular rant will be belated yet again.

A while back, I was watching the movie channel we get out here in Asia, when I saw Rambo 4 advertised ... or was it just Rambo? ... or John Rambo ...?
Well, whatever it was called, it was the newest addition to the Rambo movies series, featuring Sylvester Stallone as one of his two most famous characters, John Rambo, Vietnam veteran, ultra-commando, and all around psycho.
While I was skeptical, I gave the film a chance. Stallone looked slightly pudgy, and was wearing a shirt, but, c'mon ... it's Rambo. Freaking Rambo! They COULDN'T mess RAMBO up, right?

The end credits began to roll and I couldn't help but say, "That's IT?"
It just seemed like they hadn't put any effort into the action sequences. In most cases that might not have been such a big deal, but this is an ACTION movie. And not just ANY action movie, this is RAMBO.
First Rambo killed some guys on a boat, then he shot a couple of people with arrows, blew up a fairly terrible CG bomb, and had a large, yet strangely empty fight on a beach. Only the last fight scene had a respectable body-count, and it paled in comparison with the earlier films' climaxes, such as First Blood, or Rambo 2.

This upset me, and I didn't hesitate to let everyone know.

Time moves on, and a few months later I found myself watching Cinemassacre's "Top 10 Shoot 'em ups," the favourite gunfight-films of movie-boffin, James Rolfe. All in all, it was a pretty standard top-10 video, but one of the entries surprised me; Rambo 4.
At first, I was totally baffled. Then, I saw it. Footage of Rambo 4.
It was AWESOME.
There were body parts flying, blood spewing, and generally havoc being wrought. It struck me that this wasn't the film I had seen.

The point of this entry (a subject which isn't usually brought up half-way-through) is censorship, something that this example demonstrates.
Pretty much everyone who stumbles upon this blog will live back in the west, and so won't have come into contact with TRUE cencorship, but, anyone who's spent time here should know what I'm talking about. It's inescapable. Almost any movie you watch in the cinema, on the satellite, or rented from a video store will have some content cut.
Usually this is extreme violence or nudity, but at times relatively tame death, sex and swearing can disappear, along with any accompanying plot-points, artiness, or quality editing. In one movie, I didn't even realise a character was dead, until someone mentioned his "unfortunate demise" at the BEGINNING of the movie.

While, in most cases, you can listen through the bleeping, or imagine what is cut, and get a good idea of what the movie should be like, sometimes you can be severely disappointed, like me with Rambo.

Censorship is stupid, and altogether pointless. If you are watching a violent gore-fest, there's no doubt what you want to see, so why cut it?
I've seen the most clean-mouthed people I know watch swearing on TV and be unfazed, so why blank it out?
We're buying products, and not getting what we payed for.

Altogether, the whole business baffles and astonishes me, and, while my little opinion matters little, I wish it would stop.

Oh, and please take back anything I have ever said about Rambo 4, because I haven't actually seen it yet ...

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Next time on The Blog with a Memorable name, some other random crap that may, or may not be about Fallout 3!