Four fantastical films boldly go where some Westerns have gone before.
As we await the incredible spectacle of the total solar eclipse set to appear on Monday, we’re finding that all this watching of distant stars in the skies makes us think of science-fiction. And of course, since we ride for the C&I brand, we find that whenever we think of any movie genre, that brings us back to… well, Westerns.
Therefore, before we don our protective glasses to gaze at he rare alignment of celestial spheres, we’re looking back at four fantastical movies obviously influenced by oaters.
Battle Beyond the Stars (1980)
During the heyday of his New World Pictures, B-movie mogul Roger Corman hired up-and-comer John Sayles (Lone Star) to write a space opera loosely based on The Magnificent Seven (and Seven Samurai), and encouraged another ambitious future director, James Cameron (Avatar), to cut corners and pinch pennies while designing bargain-basement sets and special effects that nevertheless could pass muster with undiscerning audiences. The result: A rousing action-adventure starring Richard Thomas as a naïve yet resourceful farm boy charged with rounding up seven heroes — including a rowdy cowboy zestfully overplayed by George Peppard — to save his besieged planet. Robert Vaughn cleverly underplays as Gelt, a fugitive assassin best described as the intergalactic version of the character Vaughn originally played in Magnificent Seven. And as the bold Valkyrie Saint-Exmin, Sybil Danning gets the funniest laugh in the whole movie when she responds to someone who questions her apparent death wish: “You’ve never seen a Valkyrie go down!”
Outland (1981)
There’s a new marshal in town on the Jupiter moon of Io: Bill O’Neil (Sean Connery), a flinty veteran lawman determined to find out why so many workers are killing themselves at a remote mining camp. Trouble is, Sheppard (Peter Boyle), the mining company's chief agent on Io, doesn’t want that mystery solved. And worse, the camp isn’t so remote that he can’t call out for hired muscle to terminate the bothersome marshal while everyone else looks the other way. Outland “may be the oddest-looking Western you've ever seen,” Vincent Candy of The New York Times wrote, adding: “It’s also a movie of unexpected pleasures, including some uncommonly handsome science-fiction sets, a straightforward narrative that recalls High Noon without that film’s holy seriousness, some wonderfully effective chases through the darkest interiors of this huge, hermetically sealed moon camp, plus two staunch, robust performances by Mr. Connery and [Frances Sternhagen as the camp’s doctor]. Outland is what most people mean when they talk about good escapist entertainment. It won’t enlarge one’s perceptions of life by a single millimeter, but neither does it make one feel like an idiot for enjoying it so much.”
Soldier (1998)
Try to imagine Shane in outer space, and you will have a good idea of what to expect from Soldier, a lavishly produced sci-fi action-adventure starring C&I reader favorite Kurt Russell as Todd, a futuristic fighting machine who’s been raised by the military since his infancy to be a total badass. Unfortunately, Todd and others like him have been replaced by a new generation of DNA-enhanced warriors, and dropped onto a distant planet that serves as a massive garbage dump. The good news: Todd survives the forced retirement. The bad news: A colony of space pioneers who crash-landed on the planet many years earlier direly need his help to battle far less welcome visitors. So Todd has to pick up his guns and defend his new friends because, well, a soldier's got to do what a soldier's got to do.
Priest (2011)
Back in 1979, long before Kevin Bacon was designated the six-degrees-of-separation center of the pop-culture universe, critic Stuart Byron proposed in a much-discussed New York magazine essay that John Ford’s The Searchers was the primary influence for an entire generation of filmmakers. Indeed, according to Byron, everything from Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) to George Lucas’ Star Wars (1977), from Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) to Paul Schrader’s Hardcore (1979), from Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) to Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978), contained thematic and visual elements that could be traced to Ford’s classic drama of obsession and pursuit. One can only wonder what Byron would have made of Scott Stewart’s Priest, an exhilaratingly weird sci-fi/horror/futuristic adventure that is littered with allusions to Ford’s 1956 movie. Paul Bettany of the Avengers franchise stars as the holy warrior of the title, a veteran vampire hunter who returns to action when a clan of bloodsuckers kidnaps his niece — or is it his daughter? — and threatens to make her one of their own.
