5 Westerns That Could Have Been Science Fiction Films

Cowboys & Aliens was a fun if forgettable little film that had an original idea and drilled home the concept that genre conventions can be updated and blended together in an interesting new way. Sure, the flick went back to the tried and true predictable ways of both the average Western and the typical Sci-Fi, but it made me think: what if some Westerns DID have Science Fiction elements in them? Would that change the entire course of the film? Spoilers beware!

#5. Pale Rider

Quite possibly my favorite Clint Eastwood film this side of the epic Dollars trilogy, Pale Rider may not be a completely really original concept (it cherry picks several devices from the 1953 classic, Shane, respectfully), but it has this cool supernatural sort of spin to it. A mysterious preacher shows up to a mining town and helps the people with their problem of aggressive and ruthless jerkholes who are trying to invade their land and take their women! Clint Eastwood is a maniacal bad ass and the big thing about this movie is that he’s most likely a ghost. Holy moly, switch this to a Sci-Fi bent and the film could be a little crazier.

The film could take place at the same location where a mining team is trying to buy up as much land as they can around a town so that they can take the precious fluids from the soil—a special supernatural fluid (not oil) that they hope to sell to the highest bidder for the elements of energy and badassery it possesses. A mysterious stranger (Eastwood) walks into the picture with an energy gun, freaking out the locals, eating as much mutton as he can get his hands on, and is impervious to bullets of all kinds. Turns out he’s like ET—but a mother-biting crazy alien who wants to stop this company from harvesting a special fuel he needs for his spaceship so he can go back home. Hell, this might work—don’t judge!

#4. The Searchers

Ah! John Ford’s epic 1956 classic, The Searchers. It stars John Wayne as begruntled Ethan Edwards, a veteran haunted by the Civil War hoping to come to his family’s homestead (in Utah’s gorgeous Monument Valley no less) to chill and have some cold brew until the house is attacked by a pack of Native Americans and his young niece is taken. You thought Liam Neeson was a mad man in Taken? Think again, boyos and girlos! He’ll stop at nothing to get her back even if it means going to the end of time and back to rescue her.

As much as I consider this flick overrated and quite racist around every corner, I really dig it. If you put a little psychological/sci-fi/time travel thing to it, The Searchers might sound a little like this: Wayne comes back to his homestead after the Civil War, his niece gets abducted by aliens who hope to breed with her and make hybrids, he rides his horse on top of a mountain where he jumps off and gets inside the hovering ship to take care of business, but take no prisoners! John Wayne in a science fiction movie would be pretty sweet especially because he’d be making prejudiced comments about their skin and ways of life—when do you see that in a sci-fi movie?!

#3. Shanghai Noon

Speaking of a racial elements, Shanghai Noon, while not really considered a western by any stretch of the imagination, could be a much better film with supernatural/sci-fi rhythms to it. This was the movie starring Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan—oh, wait—that was another fish out of water/buddy bromance where people from two necks of two different woods have to work past their own attitudes in order to stop evil people from doing their thing. Consider this movie like Horse Hour—Rush Hour, only in the Wild West.

In my damn movie of this, Jackie Chan would be an alien sent onto Earth to rescue one of his brethren who’s been taken captive by a gang of bandits. He finds Owen Wilson’s character, takes him as a hostage and tortures him the entire movie so that he can find out how humans think and the best way to kill them. They end up falling in love with each other through the morose practice of water boarding and rescue the alien from the bandits, murdering everyone in the compound, and beaming back aboard the ship—but not before Jackie Chan kills Owen Wilson for the simple fact that love is a battlefield (As Pat Benetar so eloquently put it), and it’s all about human nature.

#2. Once Upon a Time in the West


Man, I love Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West. I don’t even want to tarnish it by adding a sci-fi slant to it…but I totally am. This is the amazing 1960s movie that Henry Fonda starred in as he stripped off his clean image and further established how much of a complete bad ass he was. What’s so fantastic about the movie aside from the interesting plot is how it’s shot, recorded, and executed. The gorgeous panoramas that Leone captured with his cinematographer Tonino Delli Colli are not just staggering, but full of richness and intriguing lines that you’re entrenched in this design of the Old West they created. The sound design is silent and menacing, which captures the entire bitterness of tension they are trying to get across. Long story short, if you’ve never seen this movie and love westerns, this is such a great movie to watch.

But I digress. So, a young lady arrives in the West, only to discover all of her family butchered. There are three men as possible suspects who did the deed—who can she trust? None of them—after flirting, protecting, and helping her out along the way it turns into an Alien sort of premise where she Ripleys all over them. They each melt together in this crazy Cerberus-type creature and she must outrun, outwit, and destroy them. Expect a ton of silence except for the screams of pain (and pleasure in her case) and she gives them the business—one bullet at a time. Intricate subplots be damned, because, as much as I love everything, this would be a shoot-‘em-up where woman conquers alien.

#1. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

Jimmy Stewart makes his triumph debut at the top of my list in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance—an easy frontrunner as one of the best John Ford films and most entertaining westerns. Stewart returns to this town of significance at the beginning of the film for his old friend’s funeral (John Wayne’s character, Tom) and flashes back to what brought them together in the event that boosted his own career and possibly ruined the friendship he had with Tom. He was a fish out of water of sorts in this town that’s being plagued by this outlaw named, you guessed it, Liberty Valance (an amazing performance by Lee Marvin), and once push comes to shove, Valance gets killed—but who really did it: Tom or Stewart’s character, Ransom Stoddard? Truth will come out, emotion will reign true, and you’ll be a part of one of the best screen stories to ever hit the western genre.

…But what if at the very end of the movie Stoddard said he was a time traveler who needed Liberty Valance for acts against the galactic federation? I’ve been watching a lot of Star Trek, but bear with me. Liberty Valance had been abducted by aliens years prior, escaped his cell, and knocked up the generals octopus looking alien daughter before killing many of the hands on deck who were allergic to lead bullets. He found a space ship, landed it back in the desert, and had gone completely bat shit since the entire ordeal. The said aliens of the galactic federation who lived in another time and space had to send Stewart as a time traveler to help destroy Valance before any of this occurred a la Terminator-style. But then, Tom has to intervene and kill Valance thus throwing off the entire space-time continuum and Stoddard, at the end of the film, has to reanimate—okay, I’m so lost, but this could easily turn into a Brazil sort of scenario that would be pretty tremendous.

© Jason Haskins, 2011