In his town, bounty hunters get strung up at the border as a warning, and everybody works for him. A villain named Thomas Jackson (Ryan Robbins) has started a settlement called Defiance. Gage is getting by, chasing her targets down on horseback, when news reaches her of a mother lode of a bounty. That there is no lack of leather, cowboy hats, guns and bullets is the most believable aspect of this future America. She cracks wise to everyone, but saves her best lines for her one friend, Doc (John Hannah). If she does some incidental good like rescuing a group of pilgrims from getting captured by those who would enslave them, so be it. She is the best she is at what she does, capturing bad guys and getting paid in powdered silver and purifying tablets.
The hero of the story is a bounty hunter called Gage (Gina Carano). It is the Wild West, but the deserts are wastelands and the bad guys burn fossil fuels. Society has devolved to a pre-industrial age. Given these conditions there are two items of value in this world: the water purifying tablets and powdered silver, the main component of the respirators. If you drink water without a purifying tablet you get poisoned. If you breathe without a respirator, you get black lung. In a montage of stock footage and a voiceover a la the opening of The Road Warrior it is explained that the environment has finally collapsed. Howitt’s camerawork is uninspired, draining the action sequences of any vitality while Leeson and Mort try to shoehorn some silly scientific exposition into a story of frontier justice. The Western aesthetic has been so thoroughly absorbed by science fiction that the quality ranges from Oscar worthy features like Logan and Mad Max: Fury Road to the SyFy channel’s short-lived series “Defiance.” The latest movie to employ this mash-up is the low budget and very pedestrian Scorched Earth.ĭirected by Peter Howitt and written by Kevin Leeson and Bobby Mort, the visual direction and screenplay compete for the designation of dullest aspect of the film.
The next time someone tells you the Western is dead you can hit him with a big old bag of dystopian science fiction movies.
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