The biggest movie released in the summer of 1985 was Back to the Future, a lighthearted time-travel romp riffing on ’50s nostalgia during the dead center of the Reagan ’80s that played well into the fall. But during the actual summer months, the box office champion of America was Rambo: First Blood Part II, starring Sylvester Stallone. The fact that it was a hit should not have been surprising; Stallone was an established star and First Blood, the film that introduced his character John Rambo, was one of his most popular outside of the Rocky series. Even so, the sheer scale of the sequel’s success was pretty staggering. It wound up tripling the gross of First Blood, at a time when sequels were considered a win if they only dropped off by a third. And it changed American action movies, well, if not forever, certainly for a while.

First Blood remains one of Stallone’s best films – one of the few to truly capitalize on both the toughness and vulnerability of the original Rocky, perhaps moreso than many of the Rocky sequels. His John Rambo is more taciturn than the friendly, lovable Rocky Balboa; he’s a Vietnam vet and a drifter who turns up in a small Washington town and is harassed and abused by a local sheriff and his cops. This triggers Rambo’s PTSD, leading to physical altercations and an elaborate standoff with the stubborn sheriff and outmatched cops. It’s a terrific thriller, full of American contradictions: It’s a mournful consideration of a veteran’s mistreatment and also, the traps that Rambo sets to foil the cops are cool as hell.

Rambo: First Blood Part II takes the series in another direction, one that would prove immensely, if temporarily, popular. It’s one of those follow-ups that’s sort of a victory-lap follow-up that’s like a fantasy version of the first movie some may have had in their heads in the first place. But in this case, the first movie isn’t just First Blood; it’s the Vietnam War in general. An imprisoned Rambo is recruited for a mission to rescue some still-held POWs over in Vietnam, in exchange for a pardon. So that the movie can have its anti-establishment cake and eat it too, Rambo is sent by the U.S. government, offering official justification, only to find out that he was never really intended to complete the mission, offering libertarian cred to accompany all the hardware. Of course, it’s not all helicopters and machine guns; some his killing is done with a bare minimum of weapons, to show off his acumen in a way that feels more fetishized than it did in First Blood.

If First Blood is a movie about John Rambo, Rambo: First Blood Part II is more like a movie you can imagine Rambo himself feverishly directing to work out some issues. It veers off into unstoppable-action-man heroics that glamorizes both American might and stubborn one-man-army individuality. To call it jingoistic seems too limiting; the movie isn’t quite coherent or dramatic enough to work as pure jingoism. Stallone leans right, but he clearly fancies himself a hard-working free thinker.

1985 was an absurdly big year for Stallone; after the Rambo sequel became his biggest-ever hit, Rocky IV came along that fall and became his second-biggest, and setting a record for that franchise with Stallone taking another trip overseas to spread democracy (or at least advertise it) through violence. It was essentially a supersized and reversed replay of his 1982 double feature, where Rocky III was a big summer hit and First Blood became his biggest non-Rocky movie that fall. The second Rambo still holds the title of his biggest movie in the U.S.; worldwide, that and Rocky IV remain neck-and-neck when adjusting for inflation. Curiously, though, that Rambo glow didn’t last.

It did in terms of how it affected other, formally unrelated movies; arguably the whole one-man-army concept that powered the subsequent careers of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Steven Seagal, and Jean-Claude Van Damme in Stallone’s wake is owed to the outsized success of First Blood Part II. (It sometimes plays even more like “what if the Terminator was the good guy?” than Terminator 2 does.) Even movies that took action in less muscled-up, swollen directions, like the landmark 1988 thriller Die Hard, feel descended from some combination of the first two Rambo movies. (John McClane may be more of an average shmoe, but it’s still him against a whole mess of bad guys.) But that same summer as Die Hard, the actual Rambo III debuted as one of the most expensive movies ever made, and barely outgrossed the first movie, let alone the second. Subsequent sequels, in 2008 and 2019, weren’t as successful as the repeated revivals of Rocky Balboa.

In fact, of the eight movies featuring Rocky, only one – the underrated fifth installment – could really be described as a box office flop compared to its predecessors. Rambo, on the other hand, has been a niche attraction since ’88. The two Old Man Rambo movies had some opportunity to take the character back to quieter, more contemplative territory. Instead, they flirt with those qualities only to double down on horror-movie-level violence that wasn’t really a part of First Blood, but does connect to the endless bullet-spray and knife-slashings of the second film.

Much like Rocky IV, easily the shoddiest filmmaking of the whole series, Stallone couldn’t escape the fact that Rambo: First Blood Part II was an enormous hit; he seemed to reluctant to fully change course from there, even after Rambo III underperformed, like he’d be accused of flip-flopping if he made a movie where John Rambo doesn’t literally rip people apart. Though Rambo: Last Blood tries to stay current by entangling our hero in the world of Mexican cartels and human trafficking, it never feels like it’s engaging honestly about America so much as drilling deeper into the fearful American imagination, leaving a real John Rambo story untold in favor of his modified self-image. First Blood is a somewhat heightened thriller about a recognizable version of America; Rambo: First Blood Part II is about exporting a version of America we tell ourselves about, sending it out to where it can really do some damage.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn, podcasting at www.sportsalcohol.com, and contributing at Patse, The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Guardian, among others.