“It’s morning again in America,” said the avuncular voice on the commercial promoting the re-election of president Ronald Reagan in 1984. Three years earlier, Hollywood had come to the White House in the form of this erstwhile B-movie star, and with him the optimistic promise of renewal following a decade of economic stagnation. If popular entertainment is as good a bellwether as any for taking the temperature of a society, then the blockbusters of the Reagan era—spanning most of the 1980s—pointed to a significant cultural shift, in which the cynicism synonymous with the New Hollywood movement of the 1970s was exchanged for the buoyant wish-fulfillment fantasies of Reagan’s ideological reforms.

You only need to turn to Hollywood’s depictions of the American war in Vietnam to see such a shift in action. Or more specifically, to the first two entries in what would become the five-film Rambo franchise. It may have been released in 1982, but First Blood feels like a New Hollywood hangover, sympathetically attuned to the social deprivations faced by veterans returning home from a war of attrition that had long since curdled in the public imagination.

Hounded by the local police of a small, North American town, Sylvester Stallone’s John Rambo brings home the war he couldn’t leave behind. Trying to parse the politics of a film that decries the cost of violence while making a case for its necessity may well be a fool’s errand, but you’ll find fewer ambiguities in the sequel which would follow just a year after Reagan’s “Morning in America” campaign. Gone is any lip-service to the realities of the war’s toxic legacies, as Rambo’s one-man-army is sent back to Vietnam to reconnoiter forgotten POWs. In many ways, it’s as quintessential a Reagan-era blockbuster as any; a revisionist vision of “renewal” and American exceptionalism whose mission statement is laid bare in Rambo’s most pertinent question to his commanding officer: “Do we get to win this time?”