Sunday, January 26, 2014

The Only Way To Make The Lone Ranger Movie Make Sense

So last night we had what I will term as a 'bad movie night'. My wife rented two movies that we had heard were bad, but were curious about: 'Percy Jackson; Sea of Monsters' and 'Disney's The Lone Ranger'. They were both bad movies that I can truly not recommend to anyone.

As this blog's title suggests I will be focusing on The Lone Ranger.

The main feeling I got through out all of the Lone Ranger movie is that our main character at no point felt heroic to me.  Most of the time his actions were non-productive and uninteresting. It was mostly luck that he achieved anything, including his own survival. Near the end he finally started to almost act heroic, even if he still didn't really feel to be so.

I got that he believed in justice and didn't think criminals should be shot in cold blood, but would rather see them have a fair trail and all that. He never once shoots a person. The real contradiction is that he is still however actually involved in allowing these men he won't shoot to die.  The last few, the big bad guys, he allows to die and celebrates their deaths. He doesn't get the moral high ground on this issue. Just because he won't use a gun to kill a person, doesn't mean he is not responsible for their deaths if they die through other means that he had a hand in. In fact things would have been much better if he would have killed in cold blood to begin with. It would have worked so much better if there was a feeling that his moral stance was actually beneficial at some level. When your main heroic character makes things worse when he stands to his morals, it just doesn't work.

We also had a really piss poor corruption of a chracter scene that was so horribly done. A good, loyal and patriotic solider does not cross the line to cold blooded criminal puppet that easily.

There were some laughs in there to help so it wasn't a total waste of a movie. And hearing the William Tell Overture made the big final action scene almost feel right.

Now the whole movie is supposedly being told from the point of view of an old Tonto to a young boy in a traveling western museum, I think. As the story is being told Tonto is moving around his little enclosure. At first Tonto looks to be a wax figure in the museum, then he moves and starts to interact with the boy.

With how little sense the story makes, how poor most of the motivations are and how so much of it feels like some kid put it together, I was able to figure out what is actually going on that would make the most sense.

The kid is eating peanuts when we first see him.  My guess is those peanuts were laced with something and the kids is hallucinating when he see the wax Tonto, and he believes it to be real.  The story is actually all in his drugged out mind.

It really is the only conclusion that makes any sense of the whole movie.

1 comment:

  1. I was halfway disappointed in the movie -- at least it wasn't as bad as the WB? rendition with Clinton Spilsbury.
    Seems this movie's emphasis was on enlarging Tonto as a character, and bringing down the heroic nature of the Lone Ranger character.
    Neither movie had a whit of the nature of the TV series starring Clayton Moore and Jay Silverheels (which, by the way, did portray Tonto and other Native Americans in a more positive manner than its contemporaries of the Western Genre. I
    Disney's version was not as awful as the critics made it seem -- I do feel it was watchable -- but it placed too much emphasis on action (s in the ride on the roof of the train.
    There is a spirit to the TV series, as hoakie as some if the episodes may seem. There is a heroic nature to Kemo Sabe and a devotion between him and Tonto that again was missed in this film, and was grossly absent in the WB version.
    The failure of these two movies might have buried the chances of another being made, but I recommend a course of action that might be effective: stay true to the main concept and premise of the TV series and Clayton Moore's character, who said "It is a bad thing to even shoot to wound the worst bad man." - that from a 50's Western special "magazine". Moore's character utilizes more strategy and subterfuge than violence. He does not even punch the bad buy until punched first. Retain this heroic quality to the character - and elevate Tonto from his speech and somewhat subservient position (although Tonto is a heroic and intelligent figure in his own right- and put a good plot with a mystery as to the outcome and maybe you will have a movie that works on the level of the 9 season long TV series.

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