Dead Man's Walk

Some things are best left imagined, no?

The real reason this was made at all and secured such a broad canvas (4 hours) is that we were eager to revisit these people, Gus and Woodrow from Lonesome Dove.

The story is that they join up with a hopeless filibustering expedition to annex Santa Fe, the film mirrors the exhaustion, aimlessness, dashed dreams on no man's land. The tone is darker—there is scalping, torture, lepers. Young Gus and Woodrow are narrowly reduced to caricature, which is bound to disappoint, but they are mostly side-characters on the journey.

But Lonesome didn't just have the endless expanses of sky and prairie, the riding and shooting. Embedded in that was a richer journey of memory and dying, a whole mess of life already folded in and centered on the vision of women. What's more, it was the true article of myth, the eulogy a mid-19th century woman like Clara would seek in a Whitman poem.

Here, we just drag our feet through the desert and the women (the same women) are tacked on in the beginning and end.

Dead Man's Walk is a series based on the book of the same name by Larry McMurtry. I've read the book and found it to be OK, if a little flat. At just over 500 pages Larry doesn't get into characterization like he did in Lonesome Dove. Where we would get entire pages dedicated to back stories of characters, he merely gives us a paragraph here and there.

The series has a good cast except for one glaring short-coming; David Arquette cast as Gus McCrae. To me that would be akin to casting Chris Rock as Jules in a prequel to Pulp Fiction. The story itself is very interesting but what happens in detail is not so much. The entire first hour of the movie is almost pointless. Other than introducing the great Indian warrior's Buffalo Hump and Kicking Wolf, there really isn't anything that is that important, both in the book and in the series. McMurtry really likes killing off people in the Lonesome Dove saga doesn't he? Don't expect much in terms of emotional sine waves, it just isn't going to happen. It's a decent movie but not very memorable.

Larry McMurtry seems to be turning "Lonesome Dove" into a cottage industry, but this "prequel" works fairly well on its own terms. It's mounted in good-looking style and has a first-rate whipping scene wherein Jonny Lee Miller, stripped to the waist, is tied to the back of a wagon and given 100 lashes, the first 50 by one man and the second 50 by another. When that first lash hits Miller's bare back, you not only see it and hear it -- you FEEL it!

I'm a Texan and as such it's hard to take the obvious mistakes made in reference to Texas geography. One minute they're supposedly on the staked plains near the Palo Duro Canyon (in the TX Panhandle) and then suddenly they're showing mountains in Southwest Texas near Big Bend National Park. Then there's the Grizzly Besr incident. At that time there wouldn't have been any more Grizzly's left in Texas where they did once range a very long time ago. With all that said, this is a good movie and enjoyable to watch. I was impressed with how the Comanches were portrayed with some very accurate depictions of Comanche horse prowess. The acting is solid. It was nice to see it was filmed in Texas in areas where I've done a lot of hiking and camping.

This old fashioned style T.V western yarn has some brilliant actors and is a prequel to the famed 'Lonesome Dove'. The strongest aspect of the story is seeing these Texas Rangers battle it out against the fearsome Apache and (lesser known) Comanche warriors. Although the show has quite a sentimental romance running through the three episodes, it also shows more than a few white folk getting scalped; a fate worse than death (but usually resulted in the latter). The quality of the cast raise it above the normal viewing standards and anyone who enjoys Westerns will certainly enjoy. Watching this it might put the Comanche at nearly number one, as bad-ass Indians as they hone torture down to a perfection.