First off, the movie is terrible. And offensive. And dumb. Whatever suspenders were holding my disbelief in check snapped within the first 10 minutes. While the issues with this film are legion, I'll focus on three themes in the movie.
Justice/Morality/Ideology
Armie Hammer's, who plays the titular character John Reid, very first line of the movie is "This is my religion," stated to an old Presbyterian woman who invites him to worship with her. As he says this, he holds up a copy of John Locke's Two Treatises of Government. John Reid, new district attorney for Colby, Texas, is obviously a studious dude, too intellectual to fall for hokey religions, and only needs Locke to tell him how to live. (He conveniently doesn't mention the sections on the justification of slavery and the rights of conquerors in Treatises).
As soon as he gets into town, DA Reid runs into his ex-girlfriend, Rebecca, who broke up with him eight years earlier and married his brother, Dan.
(In hindsight, putting on a mask and hanging out with a mentally ill
Native American isn't all that bad of a way of rebounding.)
However, it's obvious they've still got the hots for each other, so Dan hangs around awkwardly while they oogle each other. Rebecca gets mad that Dan is running off to chase bad guys again. Then, the menfolk leave to go catch the bad guys, cause that's what they did back then.
Throughout the movie, John Reid, the Lone Ranger, refuses to shoot anyone, especially the villain. By my count, at least 12 people die because John won't shoot Cavendish any of the THREE TIMES he has the chance to. Finally, John jumps off a crashing train in the nick of time to save himself, but taunts Cavendish as he is ripped apart by the train (conveniently not shown). So the Non-Violence Moral is that's it's bad to shoot people, but ensuring they're unable of escaping elaborate, deadly traps is okay. In case you missed the moral with Cavendish, Tonto kills Latham Cole--the poster child for Evil Capitalism--in the same way a few minutes later.
Later, John jumps from the train and makes out with Rebecca while simulating sex on a horse.
No, you read that right.
Y'know...for kids!!
At the end of the movie, the Lone Ranger gets ready to ride off and chase bad guys. He tells Rebecca he can't stay, in a scene that mirrors Dan telling her the same thing from the start of the film. Rebecca smiles and says she understands, but if he ever wants a FWB, to look her up.
So, the Morality Moral of the story is: your sister-in-law is fair game, as long as you wait until your brother is murdered and you let the killer go. Also, you don't need to commit or help her raise her son. Since her hired hand got scalped and you drown the man who offered her marriage, it's a cinch she'll be just fine on the 1870's frontier.
Also, the Lone Ranger has an fireside epiphany that if TWO of the guys on the frontier are corrupt, then he no longer wants to represent the law. So, he breaks up with Locke and goes vigilante. This results in him forcing a US Army soldier to shoot a bunch of his squadmates, pistol-whipping a restrained prisoner, and arranging fatal "accidents" for the villains.
So, the Justice Moral is: actually, individuals don't have to surrender personal sovereignty in exchange for communal government, but rather can ignore nature's demand for order--since Locke's laws of nature are based on there being a divine power that governs the universe--and you can pretty much do whatever you and your six-shooter can dream of.
"Do you believe in the nullification of the social contract in exchange
for individualistic anarchy? Well, do ya?"
Religion
The topic of religion is breached in one of the first scenes, where a dapper John Reid sits in a train car amidst a group of Presbyterians, all of them frumpy elderly women, one young girl, and a wild-eyed preacher, whose only lines are to call down hellfire and archetypal Christian hypocrisy. Later, the preacher takes a break from his Bible-thumping to lead a literally-torch-carrying mob into a whorehouse to kill Tonto the Indian.So, the Religious Moral of the story is: Christians are bland, boring people who don't like sex and whiskey, but especially don't like Jack Sparrow in war paint.
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| A face only a critic could love? |
Let's contrast this with some personal facts from my family. My great-great grandfather, Levi Savage, traveled across the plains in 1847 to Utah. When the Mexican War broke out, he enlisted, then went on to Utah, before travelling to Siam to preach Christianity there. However, since the French and the Siamese were banging it out, he went to Burma and India, eventually travelling all the way around the world.
Also, his wife died crossing the plains, so he raised their son by himself until he remarried. Boo-yah.
Levi Savage, 1895, age 75
Frumpy? No. Levi had three wives. Elderly? He was 33 when he circumnavigated the globe, but he lived until he was 90, journaling regularly in a diary that is widely regarded as one of the finest and most detailed accounts of the Mormon migration.
Hellfire? Nope. He taught this.
As for hating the Indians, another of my Old West ancestors had a group of Indians with a baby they had stolen from another tribe come to her home. They were attempting to trade the baby for goods, and said they would kill the baby girl if no one traded with them. My great-great-grandmother gave them a few things in a flour sack, and raised the baby as her own.
Now Nate, that's cool and all, but The Lone Ranger isn't about Christians enduring hard stuff in the name of their religion. It's about lawmen and outlaws on the frontier!
Let's examine my other great-great-grandfather, John D. T. McAllister.
Like Levi, he went on a religious mission (to Belfast, Ireland) in 1853, then helped organize the hand cart companies in Iowa for the trek west. Once he got to Utah, he was elected Utah Territorial Marshall, the top law enforcement officer for Utah Territory from 1863-1866, and was also elected the Salt Lake City Marshall, a position he held from 1869 until 1876. My family still has the gun he carried and the badge he wore. While he was doing all this, mind you, he was practicing his religion, and (for my Mormon readers) was in the temple presidencies of the St. George and Manti temples.
So no, Disney. Christians didn't cower in the corner harassing sinners while the jaded-but-handsome cowboys won the West. They were bringing order to chaos, buildings settlements, discovering gold in California, irrigating the desert, and basically building the country.
Realism
I know it might be dumb to complain about historical inaccuracies in a movie based on a lawyer coming back from the dead, but some things have to be straightened out.The Lone Ranger gets his name, not from working alone, but because he is (supposedly) the only surviving Ranger after his brother's 8-strong posse gets killed. As of 1857 (granted, 12 years before the movie is set), there was something like 100 Texas Rangers. So apparently the other 92 all died at Gettysburg or were off doing real law enforcement while John Reid is playing cowboy.
Promontory Point, where the transcontinental railroad is completed--and the final scene of the movie takes place--is not in Texas. (Because Texas totally has red-rock canyons and mountains covered in pine trees) IT'S IN UTAH. Over 1,000 miles away.
"Kemosabe, we have no jurisdiction here. Let's go back to Texas."
More than 1,000 miles. That's like having Tom Hanks announce "Okay men, it's D-Day. Get read to invade Portugal."
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"Don't worry boys. Matt Damon will issue you all copies of Rosetta Stone Portuguese."
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However, given that almost all of The Lone Ranger was shot in Utah, I guess the producers thought "hey, we should use this cool landmark; we'll just pretend it's in Texas." I realize I may be setting my standards too high; these are the same guys who thought Nicholas Cage would make a good action hero.
The Comanches never attacked settlements. FALSE. However, it wasn't as prevalent as westerns would make you believe. There was the Buffalo Hunters' War in 1877. The Comanche were ticked that hunters were still going after buffalo, so they left the reservation and shot up a bunch of hunting outposts. Five hunters and something like 35 Indians were killed.
Scalping occurs in the movie, where white men dress up as Indians and attack farms to misdirect blame. I can only surmise that Disney, Gore, and Jerry are playing up the idea that colonists were the ones who introduced scalping to the Native Americans, not the other way around. However, evidence of scalping exists extensively in human remains on the North American continent, dating back to 1325, long before European settlers arrived.
I realize Hollywood has never been big on reloading. Still, I counted as the Lone Ranger fired 10 shots out of his six-shooter before he pulled a second gun. His opponent in the duel fired more than 22 bullets from two guns in less than 9 seconds. I'm not a math teacher, but...
Six. Just six.
So, the Realism Moral of the movie is: It doesn't matter that your public school education isn't teaching you anything useful, kids, because you can move landmarks, change historical events, defy physics, and invent whatever facts you need!
In Closing
They got the history wrong. They got the physics wrong. They got the dialogue wrong. They got the Indians, the Christians, the Army, the Railroad, and the lawmen wrong. It's a badly made movie, from a filmmaking perspective. Our only hope is that this movie will hobble off into the sunset licking it's poor performance wounds and pointing fingers at everyone else. Disney's got enough Marvel heroes and Star Wars sequels to keep itself busy. Let's leave the Lone Ranger to its plethora of problems and not create a sequel ever.
