This brutal, beautiful tale of the Old West is all oil-dark humour, elite-level acting and gorgeous, lingering wide shots. It’s so fresh it makes you wonder if we’ve only just scratched the genre’s surface
Hwushoo, pya–ya–ya–yang! Oh, what, that? It’s nothing. It’s – it’s a perfect bullet shot from a rifle 700 yards away. Straight into my — yep, it’s torn straight through my torso. Little bloom of blood on the front of my shirt, look. Going dark quickly, isn’t it? Actually I think it might be monologuing time for Ol’ JG. Think I’ll take a few steps out beneath the perfect starscape above us, you know. See that star? No? Oh I really am losing a … Ah. I can see my own corpse collapsed blue in the dust. That’s not ideal.
We’re in the Old West, then, which was hell. There is no account of the Old West that does not touch upon this. It was just constant wooden-toothed men drinking liquor and dying over a card game, or families who travelled across the world for the promise of fortune and succumbed to wagon accidents along the way. Or it’s thousands of animals slain in a concerted effort to starve out the indigenous Americans, or it’s viciousness and inexplicable wasting illnesses and everyone is always spitting. The only people who seemed to have any sort of good time in the Old West were the guys selling bullets and shovels, and it’s never really made sense that we so romanticise an era of backstabbing and hucksterism and people with bad breath wearing the same pair of long johns for six months straight. Still: cool, isn’t it.
