Michael Agresta pities the state of the Western, which “finds itself in the ironic position of needing a hero to save it, and quick”:

If the genre in this era can be said to have a unifying aim, it’s to divest itself and its audiences of a strictly white, male, heterosexual perspective on history, and by extension on present day conflicts. Cowboys & Aliens is a cynical attempt at a post-racial Western–just take the Indians out of the equation so we can be good guys again!–but with more sincerity, True Grit, Django Unchained, and now The Lone Ranger have all put non-male, non-white perspectives front and center. (Two other notable movies from the past 15 years, the wonderful Brokeback Mountain and the awful Wild Wild West, also fit this model.) It’s worth pointing out, however, that all of these examples (except Brokeback Mountain) were directed by white men, and The Lone Ranger has Tonto played by an actor with only the slightest claim to American Indian ancestry.

Meanwhile, Paul Cantor thinks the zombie film has taken the Western’s place as a cultural touchstone. Millman objects:

If we are uncomfortable with the traditional western because of the role it assigns to the aboriginal Americans, and this is because we recognize the massive injustices committed by our nation and our government in the course of our conquest and settlement of the continent, well and good. But it might be that we’re uncomfortable for the opposite reason – that we prefer to see our enemies as truly non-human. As orcs, or zombies.

And we still do have enemies, after all. But those enemies are human, with human, comprehensible motivations.