Author: Trafficblast

Wild Wild West was based on an ambitious TV show that ran between 1965 and 1969 and focused on a pair of secret agents who work to protect President Ulysses S. Grant during the 1800s. The film is a mix of sci-fi, action, and comedy set in an alternative Old West, that was clearly designed to replicate the success of star Will Smith and director Barry Sonnenfeld’s previous film, Men in Black. Sadly almost none of it works, and the end result is a hugely expensive but utterly unfunny, unexciting, and deeply annoying movie, that swept the Razzies and became one of the decade’s most notorious flops.

Jonah Hex is based on the DC comic book of the same title, and stars Josh Brolin as a disfigured bounty hunter with mystical powers in 19th century America. Despite the acclaimed source material and impressive cast (also including Michael Fassbender, Megan Fox, and John Malkovich), the movie was a notorious box office failure, and its extremely short running time (73 minutes before the credits roll) suggested that much of it ended up on the cutting room floor. Thankfully, Hex was better served by his more recent appearance on the DC show Legends of Tomorrow.

Although there have been a huge number of Stephen King adaptations made over the years, it wasn’t until 2017 that a movie based on his much-loved Dark Tower series emerged. But despite initial promises of sequels and spin-off TV shows, the movie was a critical and commercial bomb, meaning we’re unlikely to see another attempt for some time. The books are an ambitious mix of sci-fi, fantasy, and westerns, but despite good casting (Idris Elba, Matthew McConaughey), the film is a muddled mess that captures little of the ambition and inventiveness of the books.

An earlier mix of westerns and sci-fi, The Valley of Gwangi is most notable for the dinosaur effects by stop-motion pioneer Ray Harryhausen. It’s set in Mexico at the start of the 20th century, and focuses on a cowgirl from a struggling rodeo who finds a cursed hidden valley where prehistoric creatures roam, including the terrifying Allosaurus known as Gwangi. While the film isn’t in the same league as other Harryhausen monster movies of the era, such as One Million Years B.C. or Jason and the Argonauts, it’s solid B-movie fun. Who doesn’t enjoy the sight of cowboys fighting dinosaurs?

While the original Star Wars played with western tropes, the spin-off Solo embraced them in a far more overt way. Long before Ron Howard replaced Phil Lord and Christopher Miller as director, producer Kathleen Kennedy stated that the move would have a “western feel,” while cinematographer Bradford Young said that one of his biggest influences visually was Robert Altman’s acclaimed revisionist western McCabe and Mrs Miller. Many of the movie’s biggest set-pieces are directly inspired by ones often seen in westerns, such as the train heist and the space saloon gambling scenes, while stylised shots like the one above are straight out of movies such as High Noon and A Fistful of Dollars.

Before he became showrunner on The Mandalorian, Jon Favreau directed this big budget sci-fi western, which unfortunately bombed at the box office. Nevertheless, Favreau manages to blend both genres without making the movie a pastiche, and ultimately, having aliens invade a town in the Wild West is no less ridiculous than the same thing happening in contemporary settings. Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford, and Olivia Wilde all play their roles with the right mix of seriousness and humor.

The 1962 film High Noon is one of the most influential westerns of all time, and Outland is pretty much a futuristic remake. Sean Connery plays Federal Marshal William O’Niel, who is assigned the job of protecting a titanium ore mining outpost on a distant moon. Unfortunately, the mine’s corrupt boss is running a drug smuggling operation and hires a team of assassins to deal with O’Niel. Director Peter Hyams originally wanted to make a traditional western, but the unpopularity of the genre in the early ’80s–combined with the huge recent success of Star Wars–led him to set the movie in space. The film was met with mixed reviews at the time, but it’s an interesting reworking of familiar themes and Connery makes for a charismatic western hero.

The Mandalorian isn’t Pedro Pascal’s first foray in sci-fi westerns. In 2018, he starred in this drama as a mysterious prospector hunting for rare gems on a remote moon, who comes up against a father and his teenage daughter looking for the same thing. Prospect’s limited budget works in its favor, allowing for an intense, small-scale character drama, with the alien world convincingly created in the striking Hoh Rainforest near Washington’s Olympic National Park.

Before he became an acclaimed indie director, John Sayles wrote clever, funny B-movie scripts for films such as Alligator, Piranha, and The Howling. He also penned this witty sci-fi reworking of the popular 1960 western The Magnificent Seven (itself a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai), which was produced by Roger Corman to cash in on the success of Star Wars. George Peppard plays an intergalactic mercenary named, erm, Cowboy, who is hired to save the planet Akir (a homage to Kurosawa) from an evil warlord. The movie is also notable for its models and visual effects, impressively created on a tiny budget by a young James Cameron.

Serenity was the movie spin-off from Joss Whedon’s much-loved but cancelled TV show Firefly, and it allowed Whedon to resolve various plot strands and give the series the finale it deserved. Like the show, Serenity takes thematic inspiration from classic westerns, as a gang of mismatched heroes explore new territory in outer space and try to escape a ruthless killer. The bigger budget and scale also allows Whedon to draw visuals parallels with westerns, with the vista of space and alien landscapes shot in an evocative widescreen style.

Michael Crichton made his directorial debut with this classic sci-fi western about robot cowboys malfunctioning in the Wild West-themed amusement park of the title. Yul Brynner plays one of the decade’s most iconic villains, the ruthless and dispassionate killing machine known only as the Gunslinger, who was based on the character Brynner played in The Magnificent Seven. Westworld was followed in 1976 by the inferior sequel Futureworld, and was more recently rebooted on TV by HBO.

While the second Back to the Future movie was a sprawling, time-hopping adventure, the hugely entertaining third film was mostly set in one location and time period–the town of Hill Valley in 1885. The setting allowed director Robert Zemeckis to throw in many western homages, from a railroad heist to a High Noon-style showdown with Biff, while Marty uses the name “Clint Eastwood” to hide his identity. Of course, it’s a sci-fi movie too, with a flux-capacitor equipped locomotive blasting 100 years into the future at the movie’s climax.