The Expendables: It’s the 80’s – All over again

Many discounted Sylvester Stallone when he produced ‘Rocky’ – the 3 Oscars it received in 1976 was perhaps a lucky strike, as the release of blockbuster ‘Star Wars’ had been delayed by 6 months. And yet, that was four years before the 70’s ended – which included the release of Rocky II.

In the 80’s, Stallone’s movies included Rocky III and IV – perhaps the most memorable one – and a set of action packed movies, including Rambo, Rambo II, Nighthawks, Cobra and Tango & Cash.

The 80’s was the time that teenagers of my era partied, listened to pop music and wore their hair in a series of crazy styles. We smoked cigarettes behind our parents’ backs and kissed inside movie theaters while eating popcorn.

We also played videogames – using our choice of 8-bit computers: the ZX Spectrum, the Commodore 64, the Amstrad and their 16-bit counterparts, the ATARI ST and Commodore Amiga. Videogames were for the most part horizontal scrolling platform games, with villains yielding knives and chains, or rocket launchers and AK47 assault rifles. The movies of that era came with a matching videogame, and every videogame felt as if it could become a movie.

The gummy-keyed Speccy fans fought the Commie “lamers” every weekend when we played videogames, but during the summer we hardly touched our computers and we’d go to the beach – friends again – to swim and flirt with foreign girls. Those were also the times that we lifted weights wanting to become like Stallone, and few of us liked Schwarzenegger – even fewer could write down his name correctly; to this day I use a spell-checker for that.

With The Expendables at the movie theaters, it’s like the 80’s are here all over again, in a strange time-warp of 30 years that has created a condensed display of the past. The music, the gunfire violence, the familiar faces of actor idols from the 80’s have become one huge Atlas all of a sudden; a giant that carries our teenage and childhood earth on his shoulders.

Living through the 80’s as a teenager is the best advantage one has when watching Stallone’s new movie; the action is mindless and the one-liners are longer than ever; in the past, Sly used to grunt a maximum of two words per scene.

And yet, it’s this exact mindless fun that reminds us that our teenage years was time well-spent, so that we can write about it now and pretend – once again – that life is one big action movie, or an 8-bit videogame.