Andre Nilsson said:
I am one of those who like this film and never understood why it was so disliked. everything he say is as I think about it.
A bit late in my response to you, but as a sort of continuation of my normal response I recommend checking out the following if you can:
1. The original "Wild Wild West" series and movies
2. The "Deadlands" RPG (paper and pencil)
3. "The Adventures Of Brisco County Jr."
Most of this can be easily found on the internet since it's old stuff. I have no idea of the legal status of most of it. I own a decent pile of Deadlands books (or did, they are in storage, sadly the last box of RPG books I tried to pull out got ruined unexpetedly, those are probably okay though), and have "Adventures Of Brisco County Jr." on DVD. Netflix, TV viewing sites, etc... might help if your curious.
At any rate as I touched on in this thread and mentioned in response to some other "Movie Defense Force" titles, the quality of something in part has to be judged based on what else was out there at around the same time. If someone else is covering the same basic ideas (utter wierdness in an alternate history Wild West), or god forbid the same exact franchise, and doing it BETTER, that's going to reflect on your product. You suck if the other guy next to you is superior so to speak. I still personally liked "Wild, Wild, West" as I mentioned, and I suppose it's easier to appreciate if you have no real knowlege or involvement with other works in the genere even for those who are. It's sort of like how "Aliens 3" suffered because franchise fans, those who really liked "Aliens" for the premise, concept, etc... were fans of "Dark Horse Comics" who for a while had the rights to the series, and allegedly on paper had the right to produce canon material for "Aliens" and a number of other franchises (which lead to numerous legal battles with differant people over the years, most of which Dark Horse lost, but that's another discussion entirely). Simply put they produced some really good "Aliens" stories that nearly all fans liked which picked up with Ripley, Hicks, and Newt leaving Cryo-sleep after the end of "Aliens". When they decided to kill of Hicks and Newt at the beginning of "Alien 3" and nixed that continuity they pretty much nuked 90% of their fan base right then and there and doomed the movie's reception.
At any rate with "WWW", try watching the original series (like anything it's hit or miss) the way the characters are defined, the buddy mechanic, etc. You'll notice where a lot of things in the Will Smith movie came from (like the stuff on the train), and also probably come to the conclusion that they bear little more than the most superficial resemblance to each other in pretty much any aspect. Albiet it could be said the TV series DID get bizzare enough where a giant mechanical doom spider would have fit right in had they had the budget or technology to make one at the time.
When you take the whole "let's camp it up even more" aestetic, you'll notice "Brisco County Jr." had just as much steampunk insanity in it, as well as a metaplot involving time travellers. It did "WWW" with a more "modern" sensibility better than the movie did, and didn't have a well known franchise name attached to it, leading to expectations from fans which were never met. Anyone going to see Will Smith, who was expecting to see James West and Artemis Gordon more or less as they remember them were not going to get it, and at that point you really have to wonder why the hell they used the franchise name other than to try and dupe fans.
With "Deadlands" I mostly mention it because at the time there was a bit of a Steampunk/Retrofantasy revival going on, and like most nerd fads, this lead to a few RPGs being produced. This was one of the more successful ones which actually got released in multiple formats (it's own "house" system, and a robust D20 version) it had not just core books like most RPGs, but a slew of supplements, a few adventure modules, and it's own fiction series. It was less "science fiction" than it was supernatural but it had both elements, and one big gimmick directed at genere fans was that a thinly disguised analogy to Doctor Loveless was a piece of work, but also arguably Earth's greatest hero, developing a lot of highly advanced/steampunk type technology to fight the supernatural. The series was popular enough where they created an entire continuity based around that guy tying together three seperate timelines, there was the western "core" setting, a near future post apocolyptic setting (the future of that world), and a far future setting on a space colony called ummm "Lost Colony" if I remember. To be honest the giant beam-shooting steampunk spider fit right in there, and vaguely remember they had one written up before the "WWW" movie which lead to a lot of nerds claiming that they were ripping off Deadlands. Albiet in Deadlands the point of things on that level were more if you ever wanted to say have a godzilla brawl with the equivilent of a risen Great Ctuhulu in the middle of Death Valley, than to try and take over the US.
