The 50 Greatest Western Movies Ever Made A hard look at one of cinema’s oldest genres.

[Hammster]

Dances with Wolves won 7 Oscars.

I don’t think it aged well.

 

[Kalevalatar]

I don’t think it aged well.

I agree. 1992 was the Columbus Quincentenary, which produced a flurry of "native american" films in the early 1990s that trid to imagine away the fact that Europeans brutally conquered a continent already occupied by athor independent peoples and cultures: Disney's Pocahontas, Last of the Mohicans, Dances with Wolves and 500 Nations, 1492: Conquest of Paradise.

 

[DragonFox91]

It's crazy how this genre is now pretty much non-existent today.

 

[Kalevalatar]

It's crazy how this genre is now pretty much non-existent today.

[warning: yada-yada academic mode] The western as a genre is defined by the frontier civilizations/society vs. wilderness/individual and tends to experience a revival whenever the era of the (western) world, if you will, experiences an upheavel. The era of the US hegemony is coming to an end and the era of a multipolar international system will replace it and I expect a revival of westerns.

 

[DragonFox91]

[warning: yada-yada academic mode] The western as a genre is defined by the frontier civilizations/society vs. wilderness/individual and tends to experience a revival whenever the era of the (western) world, if you will, experiences an upheavel. The era of the US hegemony is coming to an end and the era of a multipolar international system will replace it and I expect a revival of westerns.

I hope there's a revival. It's a shame they're pretty non-existent today. It's a great genre.

But I noticed a lot of the themes in westerns are prevalent in modern movies even if it's not specifically a western. IE "damsel" in distress, hero vs bad-guys, etc. I guess those ones have always been common in stories, tho. Some of the themes like 'settling the wilderness' aren't as much, tho.

 

[Kalevalatar]

I hope there's a revival. It's a shame they're pretty non-existent today. It's a great genre.

But I noticed a lot of the themes in westerns are prevalent in modern movies even if it's not specifically a western. IE "damsel" in distress, hero vs bad-guys, etc. I guess those ones have always been common in stories, tho. Some of the themes like 'settling the wilderness' aren't as much, tho.

Yes. I think what might have to give in, unfortunately, is the actual American Old West setting. New westerns are and will be thematically "frontier" westerns: obviously space westerns (Firefly) but also the last frontier on Earth: the Arctic and the Antarctic. I actually do see a lot of Nordic (Finnish, Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish) productions in the vein of the "Arctic Westerns" series, think the Northern Exposure type, that feature isolated (Northern/Arctic) frontier communities, law enforcement ("sheriffs," "cavalry") as main heroes/protagonists, eccentric cast of characters, all that friction between civilized South vs. wild individualistic North, cross-border (Nordic-Russia) crime/outlaw stuff (think US-Mexico) and with guns and herds (reindeer) and for example range wars.

Western themes that you can basically export to space or to little explored parts of the world in Africa, Asia, South America or the Arctica.