Rage

"Collateral damage" is a military term for harm inflicted that is incidental to the intended target.  One might argue that the 30,000 women and children killed in Gaza are "collateral damage" to the Israeli Defense Forces campaign against Hamas.  (I think this argument is probably wrong -- the massacre in Gaza is a war of  revenge for the October 2023 cross-border attack and the killing of civilians seems to be the whole point of the exercise -- that is ethnic cleansing.)  If  you fire a missile at a terrorist target and, inadvertently, kill ten non-combatant bystanders, they are "collateral damage."  The concept arose in Vietnam, although I'm not sure the term was used at that time:  "We had to destroy that village to save it."  George C. Scott's 1972 Rage - he stars in the picture and directed it -  is about "collateral damage"; this was not widely understood when the movie was released to bad reviews and flopped in '72.  In fact, the picture is considerably more thoughtful than advertised and worth watching on that basis.

Dan Logan (played by Scott) is a widower who owns a sheep ranch in Carbon County, Wyoming somewhere near Rawlins.  (Curiously, the movie uses the names of real places in Wyoming although the landscapes look more like Nevada or the Great Basin (or the Mojave desert) than Wyoming to me.)  Logan's ranch is apparently adjacent to a military base, although, like most of the exposition, this isn't revealed until later in the movie.  (The narration is oblique; for instance, we don't learn that Logan is a widower until he makes a casual remark about that status half-way through the picture.)  Logan is tending to his ranch, herding sheep and teaching his 12-year old son, Chris, to drive his pickup truck when the two of them see a helicopter coasting by overhead.  They camp out for the night.  The next morning, the boy, Chris, is unconscious with blood coming from his nose and urine-soaked pants.  Logan takes the child to the hospital where the boy is admitted and the father placed in quarantine.  Several hundred sheep are dead on the ground and Logan's German shepherd bleeds from the nose and also dies.  In some cut-away scenes, we learn that the military has been testing a nerve gas agent, MX-3, and accidentally sprayed the ridge where Logan and his son were camping.  The doctors and bureaucrats with the army understand that Chris will die and that Logan is a "dead man walking" -- the agent has a cumulative effect and kills within ten days.  Government bureaucrats and representatives of the nerve gas callously plan to study the effects of the toxin on Logan and his son.  Military physicians separate Logan from his son who dies in a harrowing and brutal scene -- the child perishes gasping for breath and making a strange, high-pitched keening moan.  Of course, the military personnel all lie and cover-up their error and the collateral damage it has caused.  Logan's condition deteriorates but he is still ambulatory and can even run -- the film's argument, as it were, requires its protagonist to have the ability to take violent action -- this isn't really plausible but the viewer is willing to suspend disbelief for the sake of the plot.  Logan, who is being sedated against his will, recovers enough to escape from his hospital room.  He explores the facility and finds his son's autopsied corpse in a freezer in the morgue.  Logan, then, eludes pursuers, steals a motorcycle, and proceeds to take revenge on those who killed his son. 

The revenge scenes are stark and realistic.  Armed with a semi-automatic rifle that he has bought at a Rawlins' gun shop, Logan confronts one of the more repulsive and deceitful governmental doctors and forces the truth out of him.  Logan, then, goes to the company that has manufactured the MX-3 agent and, in a night time raid, kills the security guard and blows the place to smithereens with dynamite charges.  (Presumably, he is planning to release the MX-3 toxin into the air near the base and kill everyone there; probably, this would kill everyone in Rawlins as well.  But, it turns out that the nerve gas is not on-site -- he's blowing up an empty laboratory, lots of lab animals, and offices.)  Logan hijacks a truck and goes to the military plant where he blows off the head of a sentry.  He crashes the truck in the base in a vacant field, gets out and starts firing without effect, and, then, drops dead, expiring under the searchlights of a hovering helicopter, pinned to the ground and twitching like an insect on a specimen board.  He dies at dawn.  The MPs led by one of the villainous army doctors collect Logan's body so that it can be dissected and the camera, again in a helicopter (these would be drone shots today) rises over the camp, moving into a final shot of soldiers who seem to be playing baseball.

Logan's climactic revenge occupies about 15 minutes of the film that is an hour and 45 minutes long.  Accordingly all of the movie, more or less, builds in a "slow burn" to the final mayhem.   Unlike the initial Rambo film, First Blood, which has a similar premise (revenge against the military and local authorities), Logan doesn't have any special skills, he's not a Navy Seal or Special Forces operative, and his lethal conduct involves shooting security guards and blowing up an unoccupied lab and office building.  In the final shoot-out, he fires a few rounds that don't hit anyone and, then, simply slips into a gruesome seizure as he dies.  The film's implicit point, which is made subtly and without emphasis, is that the victims of Logan's lethal rage are either sentries, bystanders, security guards and hapless police and some lab animals.  (The film lingers on the trapped lab animals -- rabbits, puppies, guinea pigs -- as if to emphasize that these blameless beings, like Logan's son, are the victims of callous government experimentation and, in turn, will be killed by the hero.)  When Logan confronts one of the bad guys, the film doesn't show the protagonist killing the villain -- instead, Logan guns down the man's cat, an action that epitomizes his revenge against bystanders and people who just happen to cross his path.  The film's point seems to be that Logan and his son were collateral damage to the army; the people and animals that Logan kills in revenge are also collateral damage to his real targets, the government bureaucrats and heartless doctors (one of them is played by Martin Sheen), who all survive his rampage unscathed.

The movie is directed in a workmanlike manner with odd flourishes.  There are some weird slow-motion sequences that don't really address the film's main point and that are not used to illuminate or aestheticize violence (after the manner of Peckinpah).  We see Logan spitting out tobacco juice from his chaw in slow-motion, a very strange shot, and, later, coffee  is shown in slow-mo dowsing a fire.  The scene in which Logan invades the home of the evil and dishonest military doctor begins with a sequence in slow motion showing a cat prowling around.  We are completely disoriented and wonder why Scott is focusing on the cat.  Later, the cat is gunned-down and the earlier slow-motion shots of the animal seem devised to highlight and underline the feline's later killing -- something that takes place in an instant without slow motion and that seems thematic to the movie.  We don't see the bad guy killed, just his cat, again emphasizing the idea of collateral damage.  The last third of the film involves explicitly expressionistic imagery.  We see Logan trotting along a dark wall.  Then, when more light is cast on the scene, the dark wall seems taller and more massive, an ominous image.  Much of the final part of the movie is shot in darkness with raw, angular shadows cutting across the images.  The effect of the movie is troubling:  the picture is set up so that the viewer yearns to see the arrogant and vicious military personnel punished for their  crimes.  But the people who die aren't culpable at all -- they just happen to be around.  The script is laconic.  We're not told whether Logan's motive in blowing up the munition's laboratory is revenge against the company or some insane plot to destroy everyone in sight by releasing the nerve gas.  The action is generally underexplained and we are left to our own devices to interpret what we see.  In the final scenes, Logan, sweating heavily with a bloody nose, staggers around like a zombie, one of the living dead, on his wrathful errands.

Quentin Tarantino has said that Rage is his favorite movie and, indeed, there's much more in the film than meets the eye.  (George C. Scott has strangely feminine lips; he always seems to be primly pursing his lips -- it's an odd aspect to his physiognomy and subverts the notion that he is an "all-man, he-man" hero.  In keeping with film practice in the early seventies, the opening titles don't occur until about ten minutes into the movie -- this was a habit with filmmakers of that era.) 

The term "collateral damage" dates to 1905, used in non-military contexts (for instance, civil engineering as to dams and other water projects).  An army targeting manual printed in 1961 uses the phrase in a military setting, but the expression didn't come into common parlance until the mid-80's.  The phrase, usually blamed on Vietnam (like many things in our recent history), was almost never used during that conflict.  It's not a term that George C. Scott would have known in 1971 and 1972. With each year, the term is more and more in vogue.  High-minded critics of the phrase as a euphemism haven't come up with any convincing substitute for the expression which is, in fact, reasonably precise and meaningful and does not seem to have been invented in bad faith -- "collateral damage" can come in many forms:  killing, wounding, traumatizing, as well as destruction of property, infrastructure and the environment; the term is a useful phrase that covers all of these effects as well as others.