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One week ago, news broke regarding the next entry in Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo franchise.

Rambo V: The Savage Hunt will divert the franchise into science fiction territory akin to Predator.

The official plot synopsis according to Aint it Cool News was loud and clear:

A beast is loose somewhere north of the Arctic Circle…And the raging creature is headed south toward civilization, ready to wreak bloody devastation…It’s a job that Rambo and his 22-year-old hunting partner, Beau Brady, can’t turn down, but they and a team of highly skilled Special Forces Kill Team [sic] discover that the prey is beyond their wildest imagination, a half-human abomination created by a renegade agency through a series of outlawed genetic experiments…they’ll still have to confront the grim reality that it may have grown immortal.

As far as I know, the only franchises to really change its genre in the middle of the series (although this will quite possibly be the end of this one) have been the Evil Dead series, which shifted from horror to horror-comedy to adventure-comedy, and the Alien series which flip-flopped twice from dramatic horror to straight-up action films.

Even those are stretches, though, that don’t compare to this. It’s an unprecedented fluctuation that seems to tear a gap in all sense of reason — a series of four anti-war bloodbath action films followed by a far out, clunky monster movie? I don’t intend to evaluate the film before I see more of it, but the concept is obviously strange.

I understand the intention — we’ve seen John Rambo slaughter hundreds of lesser fools, so now the next step is to pit him against some sort of equal, and I gather that the only being in existence capable of challenging him must be a creature from outer space.

However, to say that this is a possible misstep is an understatement — too many elements being introduced are new while straying too far from the subject material. Beau Brady will diminishing the lonely quality of the lead character, which was the central conceit to begin with. Colonel Trautman’s guidance throughout the first three films doesn’t seem to have any bearing on what Rambo is in store for.

The film won’t even have a bloodbath on its side, if Stallone’s intended PG-13 rating is set in stone. Rambo was a far cry from First Blood, but on a visceral level it was perhaps the most satisfying entry in the series.

I’m obviously evaluating the film on a conceptual level, but it just seems that the series has the potential to jump the shark at an awfully late stage in the game (fire shooting out of both sides of Rambo’s torso in Rambo III seems like an everyday occurrance in comparison). Never was the series heralded as an incredibly deep character piece, but the humanity steadily decreased throughout the series.

Now, it almost seems a meta joke to feed Rambo to a non-human enemy. This is a far cry from Vietnam. A war I won’t believe? I don’t doubt it.