On Saturday, I went to the movies for the first time in 20 years with my father. We went to see “The Lone Ranger.” my dad grew up with the radio serials, and later the television show, and the Ranger and Tonto have been his heroes for nigh on 70 years. So when he told me he wanted to go to the movies and see it, I jumped for joy and prepaid for our tickets.
You see, Westerns are kind of our thing. Saturday afternoons were spent curled up in the la-z-boy watching the old movies. My father was raised by a grandmother who was Cherokee, and she did an amazing job of educating him on what was real and what was Hollywood stupidity. My father grew up in the cowboy traditions but was well educated on both sides of the fence, so we usually rooted for the Indians (yes, we called them Indians) just as much as the cowboys. To this day, we usually spend Saturday afternoons with Jeremiah Johnson or Rooster Cogburn, and as such I have a deep love of the American Western – a genre that seems to be a dying art.
I have certain expectations when I go see an Action Western, and they are as follows:
- A beautiful score, with the melody in the treble strings and horns, and a syncopated rhythm in the bass section. One that does not employ the use of hoof sounds, but you hear them anyway.
- Beautiful location shots with mesas and/or mountains and sun so bright you can smell the desert dust.
- Train heists.
- Horse stunts.
I also have expectations from Gore Verbinski movies:
- Explosions.
- A giggle here and there.
- Also more explosions.
So, without giving anything away, I pretty much got all of that from this movie. This movie is getting panned, and not just for the political reasons, and I really don’t know why. What the hell were people expecting? You guys – I had so much fun watching this movie, and not just because I could glance over and see a glimmer of mirth on my 74 year old father’s face. Yes, there were some pacing problems (a couple of times I found myself thinking “less talky more ‘splodey, please”) but it has been a very long time since I have been in an audience that collectively gasped and winced and cheered, and that happened during “The Lone Ranger.” The visual effects both large and small scale were everything I have come to expect from a Verbinksi film – i.e. spot flippin’ on.
The characters were fleshed out enough for me to care, but Tonto is the only character to have a reinvented origin story. And to be sure – this is really Tonto’s film. It also falls into the recent trend of historical fiction revealing the White Dude to be an arrogrant, greedy, evil villain – which I have zero problem with, because it’s about goddamn time. I suppose now is as good a time as any to touch on the controversy, but being so white I am pale blue I have very little to say on the subject, and am in fact completely torn. On one hand, yes, it absolutely sucks that a white guy plays Tonto and that Tonto’s portrayal is an amalgam of native cultures. On the other hand, if we are looking to Hollywood to educate we might as well start the apocalypse countdown now, because Hollywood is a business, plain and simple. I tend to be a glass-half-full (read: naive) type person, and think that you can educate a child on the inaccuracies in film and spark a whole new interest, but I was lucky enough to have that experience, whereas I do acknowledge that most are not.
So yeah, if you go into this movie expecting high art and/or historically accurate representations of anyone, you are going to be mightily disappointed. But if you go in munchin’ some popcorn, sippin’ on a squishy and want to see some beautiful stunt work and some alarmingly beautiful train recreations (which, admittedly, are probably the cause of the film’s inevitable monetary loss), go for it. All in. And have an awesome time.