Archive for the ‘Deep Thoughts’ Category

Writer/Director Joss Whedon’s 2005 film Serenity combines genre conventions of both Westerns and futuristic science fiction films.  Though the events of Serenity and the Fox television series that inspired it, Firefly, take place a little over 500 years into the future, everything from the character typology and dialogue to the stories and costuming are more akin to classic Westerns than sci-fi films.  However, though series-creator Whedon more heavily utilizes elements from Westerns, he does not simply transfer them unchanged.  Instead, Whedon rewrites traditional Western conventions in order to make them more reflective of and relevant to contemporary society. Read the rest of this entry »

The Dark Knight

The Dark Knight: Batman Becomes a Westerner

The character of Batman as presented in director Christopher Nolan’s 2008 film The Dark Knight represents many of the iconographic elements that comprise what is known as the Westerner. The caped crusader can more accurately be distinguished as being more medieval (that is, consisting of character traits more attuned to medieval literature) in most of his filmic representations, such as Tim Burton’s Batman (1989), and such a connection does not completely stop with Nolan’s most recent feature as even the film’s title outright labels its hero a “knight.” But despite this, Nolan has introduced the character of Batman to the world of cinema in a new way that displays him more as a western idol reminiscent of the days of John Wayne. American audiences gorged themselves on this newest version of the classic superhero, amassing a domestic box office revenue of over $530 million (second only to Titanic’s $600 million+), and the reason for this may be found in the social structure of its viewers. Read the rest of this entry »

The Thing

When released on June 25th, 1982, director John Carpenter’s The Thing made a little bit of noise with critics, but did little else to make a name for itself. That little bit of noise was not even positive however, as critical consensus was that the film gave away too much and yet harbored very little. Packed with gore effects of a quality that made even the most hateful reviewers concede to their brilliance, it was nevertheless those very effects which caused those reviewers to look upon the film with disdain and disgust. Since its lousy release, though, The Thing has slowly become more critically renowned and is a prideful source of entertainment and reverence for many horror and sci-fi audiences. It proves that in some cases, like some people, some films are simply made outside of their times.

The Thing (1982) is a quasi-remake of the 1951 Howard Hawks film The Thing from Another World, but is more so, as claimed by Carpenter himself, an aspirant adaptation of their source material, which is the short story titled “Who Goes There?” (1938) by writer John W. Campbell Jr. Hawks’ version had long since been revered by fans and critics alike when Carpenter’s film was made, and by that very token could have ostensibly doomed any hopes that Carpenter might have had about making his film more successful on all levels. But Carpenter himself is an admitted fanatic of Hawks’ film, with Howard Hawks being one of his favorite directors of all time. So then, why do a remake? Carpenter’s version, written by screenwriter Bill Lancaster, is unlike Hawks’ in that the thing itself (i.e. the monster/alien) is not a man in a suite parading around like an alien (Hawks) but is actually as it is described in Campbell’s story; an organism that possesses the ability to occupy and imitate life forms of any shape and size (Billson, p.14-16). This differentiation in the makeup (that is, the physical and philosophical makeup) of the alien being is what Carpenter hoped would make his film much more frightening. Read the rest of this entry »