Westerns are cool.
Westerns are America's legends, or at least the legends of the America that we have become. The gunslinger is America's knight in shining armor, our samurai, our cultural exemplar of a hero. The Western is a story about a hard man living in a hard time, a man who doesn't want to be a killer but must in order to battle the killers threatening those he loves. The Western is a story about a man who, after the entire movie has been spent piling pressure on him, becomes willing to take damnation onto himself in order to protect those who can't bear that burden not because he's broken and has become a beast but because he has made a choice as a man to embrace what of the beast he can use as a man. The Western is set in a nearly fantastical world we barely recognize where water is scarce and where enemy armies are camped out in the darkness just beyond our sight. The Western is a magical experience when done right, and if one is in a theater I will always go see it.
I did not go to see the Lone Ranger, and I never will, because I have no reason to believe it is a Western. I have seen nothing to suggest it has any understanding of what makes a Western great, and from what I've heard, no one else has seen that either.
This is not intended to rebut anything Mr. Chipman said. I'm sure his analysis is spot-on, and even if it isn't, I haven't seen the movie myself so I don't get to call him a liar. I'm only saying the Lone Ranger did not really want to be a Western, and that is a source of great sadness for me.