Hacker Cinema
Wild Wild West
1999 · Film · 106 min
Directed by Barry Sonnenfeld
ActionAdventureComedyScience FictionWestern
Legless Southern inventor Dr. Arliss Loveless plans to rekindle the Civil War by assassinating President Ulysses S. Grant. Only two men can stop him: gunfighter James West and master-of-disguise and inventor Artemus Gordon. The two must team up to thwart Loveless' plans.
6 negative7 neutralfrom 13 commenters
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14 comments on Hacker News
You might not be aware Verhoeven never read the book. Have you?
I think it's unrealistic to suggest Verhoeven had anything subtle in mind. He had a line he wanted to spout, and he did it.
I've always thought about it like the Giant Spider: https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/6/28/18761548/wild-wild-west-will-smith-20th-anniversary
Director wanted a thing, and the subject matter fit was irrelevant. shrug. I call it "Bug Wars", and as such it's a well animated B movie.
The original "Wild Wild West" was a TV show; there was a 1980 TV movie, but the 1999 film is neither a remake nor a sequel to that 1980 movie. I'm using pretty expansive/liberal definitions of the terms here, I admit, but I think broadly my point stands just fine.
The Wikipedia article for 1999 in film is there for all to see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_in_film#1999_Wide-release_films
Between The King and I (Disney animated), Baby Geniuses, Doug's 1st Movie, 10 Things I Hate About You, Wing Commander, The Rage: Carrie 2, My Favorite Martian, and Office Space, I see plenty of sequels, low-effort trash, and remakes. And that's just stuff that came out in the first three months of the year.
edit: We got a remake of Wild Wild West, a remake of Tarzan, a sequel to Austin Powers, a sequel to The Brave Little Toaster, a prequel to Star Wars, and our second Shakespear adapation of the year in months 4-6.
double edit: In 7-9, we got another Muppet movie, an Inspector Gadget remake, The Haunting and The Thomas Crown Affair were both remakes, a Universal Soldier sequel, and a Dudley Do-Right remake.
I have no interest in continuing to analyze this list, thing were just as bad twenty years ago
>On the other hand, I didn't know that "Wild Wild West" was by Will Smith!
It was from the Wild Wild West remake movie he starred in as well. I think they were trying to recreate the success of the Men in Black formula[0] but that song wound up being the only part of it that anyone remembered.
[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiBLgEx6svA
> Casting a `proper' actor as the villain in a silly movie is always a great idea.
Kenneth Branagh in Wild Wild West. (Not sure if that example supports or refutes your claim.)
I don't think it's "beyond you", I think it's so simple you passed right above it.
A "philosophical super-hero" in the context of Matrix, circa 1999 is something along the lines of:
Everybody's asleep like Jim Careys in the Truman Show. Reality is not what we think it is. We're all slaves, we're all miserable even if we think we're happy. It's all a lie. “They” control us. “They” know and keep us ignorant. “They” are the reason why we suffer so much and we're not even fully aware of it.
Enters Neo. Neo is a cool dude who should have been Will Smith but he declined to do Wild Wild West — crazy sci-fi in the machine seemed less blockbuster-worthy than big machines exploding in the Far West, yeah, that was a bad call. But I digress.
Neo who's not black, unlike Morpheus, is not like the rest of us. No no no: he's AWAKE(ning). He's woke, man! Like F, this should have been Will Smith, that smug look haha. Oh boy, I digress. Not that Matrix itself is boring but.
Then there's Zion. It's really the Bob Marley ideal, because why not, heaven can only be full of hippies of sorts, and the idea is that if humans "escape" the bad guys, they can all go party to Zion. Cue NOT Laureen Hill, that was a fail honestly.
So, imparted with this supreme Knowledge about “them” and heaven and Morpheus' BFF and so on, Neo can do a whole lot of cool tricks because he now "knows". And there he goes, solves the puzzle in a trilogy because that sounds nice, and the good people are now free. Probably. Or not. Who cares at that point. The whole story was never about that anyway.
So, that's the level-1 "philosophical hero". He just "gets it" and that makes him stronger. There's also a big nod to human versus machine in that the Matrix, the bad guy-s, they don't understand "love" the way we do, and Neo.. well, he's the romantic you know, he loves Trinity and that's the key to his ultimate surviving. “A truly original take on what it means to be human”, said nobody ever who wasn't born the day before.
So, yeah, I'm sure you can see all of that, and (rightfully imho) thought it wasn't much "philosophy" material.
HOWEVER! there's level-2. For the "woke" people among us, you know, those who "get it" like Neo. (I'm joking but I think it's a little bit like that, there's a smugness to Matrix fans, even those who seem to indeed "get it".)
This is my liberal interpretation of level-2. I've looked at YouTube videos analyzing the movies because frankly I didn't get it, like you. And then I had my own "awakening" in life, but it's much less glamorous than Neo, it means shitty experiences for stupidly long times and then somehow emerging the other side and being alive enough to tell about it. Long story short, I kinda "get" what they possibly mean. It's as old as the oldest mythologies conceptually, e.g. the "Maya" in Hindu (Sanskrit: “magic” or “illusion”).
So the matrix is an image for "whatever you think is impossible", the opposite of what is sometimes termed "abundance" mindset — I can't do this, I'll never have that, this is impossible for me, etc. It's a veil on reality, and critically self-imposed, of our own doing in a modern interpretation, more agnostic about gods if you will.
Anybody who does something in this world must at some point on the way remove such limiting thoughts, usually much wider than the mere topic — whether business owner, moviemaker, musician, scientist, etc. In HN of all places the sample is skewed as hell, but some of us probably see that most people are self-imposedly very limited in their "possibles".
I could elaborate but you get the gist. Everything else is filling with analogies and good moviemaking, probably, or not, whatever, who cares at this point.
Level-3 exists, some people do that: they take pop content and slap philosophical references because "quotes" and "easter egg". But then they elevate the easter above the egg and we're all dying of an empty brain because Matrix is now officially better than the Odyssey and La Comédie humaine combined.
Did any of this speak to you, should you have read even just 1 paragraph? :D
Wild Wild West was a bad movie, but I think the whole steampunk aspect of it was really interesting and well done. Not-Will-Smith's decked out spy train car was really cool. The steam-powered spider mech was a little hokey in retrospect, but still kinda awesome in its own way.
> I thought the steampunk genre was born with Wild Wild West - that awful Will Smith movie from '99.
It decidedly did not start with the 1999 film based on the 1960s TV series featuring the same named characters and themes.
> I thought the steampunk genre was born with Wild Wild West - that awful Will Smith movie from '99
I'm very curious, how old are you? This statement baffled me because it reads as if talking about ancient history.
Steampunk was most assuredly not born out of the 1999 movie. If some ridiculous movie tainted your view of the genre, I think that's more a reflection of you than the genre or the terrible movie.
That said, the movie was supposedly inspired by a series from the 1960s by a nearly identical name ("The Wild Wild West".) The genre, however, has been around for much longer, and the name 'steampunk' seems to have its creation in the 1980s.
I usually see it in a retro-futurist parallel universe. Depending on the definition of "literature", Wild Wild West was a movie set in The Old West, but exhibits technologies that definitely didn't exist at the time. Those technologies seem to aesthetically fit in the movie's semi-fictional era.
I thought the steampunk genre was born with Wild Wild West - that awful Will Smith movie from '99. That's what I remember from living through it. I would actually have a bit more respect for steampunk as a subculture if it's genesis resided elsewhere - that movie was so ridiculously stupid that steampunk has been tainted for me by association.
Edit to add: apologies all around, dear steampunk enthusiasts! Fwiw Steampunk really didn't enter anything close to the mainstream in my corner of the U.S. until that movie came out, and afterwards seemed to be everywhere I looked, so I don't think it was a totally unreasonable assumption. (And yes, I knew the movie was based on older material, but didn't know to what extent the visual aesthetic had already been defined.) As penance I will purchase one Steampunk item from my local costume store and wear it to my next all-hands work meeting.
> If The Great Wall had turned out to be the massive hit everyone was expecting, this process might have continued. But The Great Wall was not a hit. It was a massive flop—in China, America, and everywhere else.
OK, I don't go the the movies a lot [1] so am generally unaware of much of what is in theaters, but I do watch a lot of TV live (as opposed to on DVR) on channels that have ads and on which studios run lots of ads for the movies that they expect to be big, so I'm usually aware of what is opening that the studios are expecting to be big.
I don't recall ever hearing anything about this movie before reading that article. Was there something anemic about their advertising in the US? Or were the ads just so forgettable that I did see them but completely ignored or forgot them?
[1] My complete movie theater history for the last 20 years: American Beauty, Gladiator, second two Matrix movies, the three Lord of the Rings movies, the Star Wars prequel trilogy, Wild Wild West (by accident...was trying for Star Wars and went into the wrong theater), How to Train Your Dragon 2, How to Train Your Dragon 3: The Hidden World, and Avengers: Endgame.
I remember seeing this in the Wild Wild West[0] movie from 1999. It's curious seeing the history behind it.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LFHZDXhUI8