If you haven’t read the blog post Birth Of A Genre: Cowboys and Aliens, read it now.
Since that posting, we’ve seen Jonah Hex:
The U.S. military makes a scarred bounty hunter with warrants on his own head an offer he cannot refuse: in exchange for his freedom, he must stop a terrorist who is ready to unleash Hell on Earth.
Followed by Priest:
A priest disobeys church law to track down the vampires who kidnapped his niece.
And somehow I missed the passage of Warriors Way:
A warrior-assassin is forced to hide in a small town in the American Badlands after refusing a mission.
And of course I am still looking forward to Cowboys and Aliens.
So the great Western-Genre mashup experiment is well under way.
Now in our humble opinion, where these films *might* fall short is in their honesty to their Western roots … they go big on humor, or on modern green screen “300” stylistics. Or they focus on their genre to the detriment of their Western influences.
They drape themselves in the trappings of Western, but they carry no honest “Western” feel. They bear no resemblance at all to The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, or High Plains Drifter, or Fist Full Of Dollars.
Is it working for you? Are these films hitting the mark? Or are they falling short?
We hope it’s working for you … or at least that you haven’t been completely turned off to the concept, cuz true to my word in the last posting, we’re working on a Western-Genre mashup screenplay of our own. It’s big, it’s epic, it’s got classic film roots and contemporary features, and it retains that Sergio Leone feel that just might be missing from these latest outings.
So whaddya think?
You want more Western-Genre?
We’re working on it.