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Title: Cormac McCarthy meets Jim Jarmusch
Review: One can only speculate whether Jarmusch was reading McCarthy's novel BLOOD MERIDIAN when he wrote this script. But the similarities are haunting -- from the emphasis on technical details and the role of technology, to the pure evil embodied by Jarmusch's bounty hunter Cole/McCarthy's frightening Judge Holden.This is a great film. It brings the Western genre into the postindustrial/postmodern era, and like all great Westerns it's not really about "The West" at all. Yes, Jarmusch hits us over the head with symbolic elements such as Indian's fire crowning the dead marshall's head or the sequence of the train's running gear leading Bill Blake toward his death in/rebirth from the dark Satanic mills of Machine. But this overt play of semiotics forces us to demythologize the code--or, at least, to question the structural narrative of the code as essentialist metanarrative/Truth.
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