I disagree with that. The movie has its flaws, but it still touches on all of the major themes in the book; apathy, vanity, misogyny, selfishness, greed, lack of identity.
The first thing that sprung to mind when I saw the thread title was First Blood. Maybe not a great movie, but a solid one. It has good acting, very well staged action, and a nice atmosphere.
And it completely and utterly misses the point of the book.
The film is firmly on John Rambo's side. Will Teasle is the over-the-top villain. Rambo just wants to be left alone, and he doesn't want to hurt anyone. If society could just leave him alone.
Rambo's side of it is in the novel, and we most certainly feel sympathy for him. But he's not the hero. There is no hero. John Rambo is a deeply troubled individual. He's deliberately defiant at the beginning, to the point where we can't blame Teasle for having to up the stakes, even though Teasle
was being to drunk on power.
Rambo kills people. And though from a certain point of view, it's self defence, he really does commit some heinously cold acts of violence, sniping first the tracker dogs and then the police themselves. He'll go as far as to stalk, corner, and kill a cop from behind.
Teasle is just as much a protagonist as Rambo. He makes some poor choices at the beginning, but once things escalate, you have a better, more empathetic understanding of why he does what he does. For much of the novel, he's driven by unbearable guilt for having carelessly set off this wild animal. It's what drives him to so ruthlessly pursue putting Rambo down.
It's a novel about the hopeless means of violence, about hardheadedness, about hubris, about damage. It's an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object. It's a metaphor for the Vietnam War.
