Rolling Thunder is a 1977 psychological thriller directed by John Flynn and staring William Devane, Tommy Lee Jones, Linda Haynes, James Best, Dabney Coleman and Luke Askew. The film centres around Major Charles Rane a recently returned Vietnam P.O.W that loses his right hand and his wife and child with a violent home invasion with a gang of thugs. From this he seeks revenge with his friend Johnny another POW to exact revenge. Rolling Thunder is a film showcasing the horrors the Vietnam war created for the soldiers that fought it and the PTSD that they gained as a result that destroyed their lives.
The film starts with a very over the top American image of a high school brass band playing as people wave flags to welcome home and celebrate two Vietnam veterans coming home from the war, which is contrasted the soldiers plane dead look as they use sunglasses to hide their dead eyes and the PTSD they have suffered. The soldiers create a fake personality that they put on for both their officers and the public Rane gives a speech that is incredibly empty filled with over positivity and fake patriotism, this fake persona presenting everything as ok is further shown when Rane’s wife and son hug him. Vohden the other solider has a detached look from seeing his wife and family as from the war and PTSD the soldiers even have an emotional disconnect form each other. This disconnect is also shown as his doesn’t know him as he tries to build a connection with him but realises Cliff has become his surrogate father figure now. He gives his son an American flag he made in the POW camp. The film is about the effect war has on people as his son doesn’t remember him, him and his wife Janet have a stilted conversation as they can’t properly communicate with each other. When she gives him his gift of mints, he is again remined of the war saying he had one in his pocket the day he went down. With disconnect due to the war is shown when his wife tells him she had an affair with he stoically accepts a realisation which is something a lot of vets went through. Showcases of the reason behind his PTSD are shown with the flashbacks of him being toured in a POW camp as he continues his training regime like his still back in the war, by making his bed and sitting on it the same way he did in the POW camp.
He can’t sleep and the pills don’t work so he goes to the doctor to try and combat his PTSD, when his wife asks him for a divorce heh as no emotion again showing the disconnect form reality, he has due to the war, however despite this its obvious that he does care or his son. At his grand homecoming ceremony, he shows his fake public persona of a normal persona when his is given a car and has his ID bracelet retuned to him by Linda a attractive young woman and they give him two thousand dollars again his fake patriotic persona is shown with the fake happy feeling ceremony juxtaposed with a real darkness of the character. Rane tries to form a bond with his son who he still loves despite everything. He then has a conversation with Cliff the man who his wife had an affair with. Cliff tries to sympathise with him, but Rane knows that his talking rubbish. Rane tricks him into helping him by showing him how they tortured him to scare cliff so that Rane can remember the experience and by letting him torture him he is torturing Cliff.
Rane ends up going for a drive with Landa who puts advances on him. However, Rane has difficulty returning her affections, she tries to bring out the humanity in him by symbolically taking his sunglasses off. However, he symbolically puts them back on as he can’t communicate with normal people and therefore rejects her advances. In the scene where he goes to his son’s baseball game it again shows that does love his son and wants to form a connection with him, he just doesn’t know how to express himself. However, when he returns home one day, he finds a gang waiting for him wanting to steal his money. During this scene he has no emotion due to his experience in the Vietnam war as his not scared of this. This causes a flashback to him being tortured in Vietnam again showcasing the horrors of war as he flashes sees the thief as vitamise and gives out his military information. They then mangle his hand in a garbage disposable witch again induces flashbacks of him being toured by the Vietnamese, when his wife and son comes home, they kill them and leave him for dead. The film then flashes forward to show Rane in the hospital with an artificial arm as Linda watches over him. Vohden visits him as well as saying his going back into the military as he can’t connected with his wife showcasing how the Vietnam war makes people constantly detached due to the horrors they experience as the soldiers can’t even connect with each other.
This PTSD disconnect is shown as Rane doesn’t even have an emotional response to his wife and son dying, with Linda being Rane’s only emotional connection to the real world as she genially cares for him. Rane ends up withholding information from Cliff who wants to go to the police, however Rane wants to get revenge himself dude to his duty as a soldier, again relating to his PTSD as he is seemly emotionless towards their deaths. In a scene he practices putting cigarettes back in the box with his hooked hand as like the soldier he is as he is signally focused on his mission, Rane is shown to be seemly motionless due to PTSD however there is clearly a rage building up inside of him. He prepares for his revenge in the cold way like a soldier preparing for a mission as he sharpens the hook on his hand. He ends up getting Linda to accompany him on his revenge. This creates a certain moral grey area in the film as she clearly likes him and is for most of the film is unaware of his true intention, within the film Linda ss symbolic of Rane’s humanity the bit of him that he lost in the war. Her first task is to locate one of the members of the gang and almost gets assaulted when Rane saves her, the coldness in which Rane kills these men meaning he is single minded in his vision and all he wants is his revenge as he has a very militaristic approach to his task. A conflict then arises between Rane and Linda as she finds out about his true intentions and begrudgingly helps these tensions between the two are mirrored with the tensions between Rane and Cliff his brother-in-law who find out his true intentions and tires to find him. Rane and Linda have an interesting relationship within the film. There is defiantly tension there, but they also seem to like each other to a degree hinting to a possible romantic tension that can never be.
Linda tries to locate Billy Sanchrs to try and find Fat Ed. As this happens Rane and Automatic Slim get into a fight where he injures Slim with a crouch with his hook hand. Linda ends up getting angry with Rane initiating a fight that stops when they realise all they have is each other, again there is a moral ambiguity to Rane throughout the film. During a scene in the film Rane is listening to a song and says that he remembers the song form when he was alive. This means before war showing the horrible experiences that he went through has stripped him of his humanity making him an emotionless shell like the living dead. Rane gets ready for his mission of killing these men by practicing with a gun paralleling military training, as this happening the film gives backstory on Linda in that she knows how to fire a gun her dad was in the military and wanted a boy and that her mum hates her and she’s divorced shows how her life is just as empty as Rane’s, and they both don’t have much left to live for. Rane ends up getting offended by Linda saying she wished she had something more exciting to shoot at as he has experienced the horrors of real combat. He gets cleaned up in his military uniform informing his militaristic need for combat as she finds out his here to get his friend which he denies as she tries to talk him out of his revenge, but he won’t budge. She ends up confessing her love to him and its clear he has some feelings towards her but can’t express them due to his PTSD as his constantly haunted by thoughts of his dead wife and son.
Cliff ends up tracking down Lopez and kills him before Automatic Slim kills Cliff. As Linda and Rane bond the film shows that Rane is dead on the inside. His humanity is stripped from him, but they do care for each other, this is shown when Rane leaves her as he doesn’t want her to be part of this. By leaving her with money it shows he cares for her, she tries to ring the police but can’t bring herself to do it as she has feelings for him. Rane goes to visit Vohden his military friend in his home who in an interesting parrel is just as emotionally distant from his family as Rane was with is wife. Rane informs him that he found the men that killed his wife and son, in response to this Vohden gets his guns and unform and goes with him no questions asked again showcases the emotionless militaristic duty of these men and that all they know is war and the have nothing left to live for. At the climax of the film Rane and Vohden track to a brothel. For a direction Vohden goes in through the front and gets a prostitute, he is emotionless and detached when she is about to have sex with him showcasing how they are impacted by war, and they have had their humanity destroyed. As this happens Rane sneaks in round the back, he kills one of the men initiating the shoot-out as Vohden takes this as his que to get his shotgun, when the prostitute asks him what he’s doing he calmy responds “killing a bunch of people” showcasing the emotional detachment of the characters in that this is not shown to be a heroic venture but more disturbed people doing their duty. In a bloody shootout they kill Texan, T-Bird, Melio and several other men before Rane kills automatic slim by shooting him several times. At the end of the film Rane and Vohden walk out of the brothel bloodied and injured supporting each other, they may have killed the enemy but there no real victory their lives are still destroyed by the war and the people they killed the got their revenge, but they still must deal with the horrors of their lives.
Rolling Thunder is about the horror that war inflicts on a human being and that their horrible experiences are what can inevitably destroy a person’s life.