It’s been a while since I saw the original, but at least half the film was about getting the gang together. But the original was also three hours long.
Whoops! I did searches both for “Magnificent Seven” and “Magnificent 7” and came up with nothing. My Search-Fu is weak. Should we migrate that way or what?
I’d say Goodnight Robicheaux (the Confederate veteran with PTSD) was probably my favorite character partly because of that element and his friendships with the Korean Billy and black Chisolm. For as relatively little he had to do in the film, they managed to present quite a bit of depth with a handful of details.
Sometimes what makes a character interesting is how other characters react to them, and this is also a big part of what I liked about Goodnight. Contrast how Chisolm and Billy (who are friends of his) react to his difficulty fighting with how Faraday (who has only just met him) does.
Also, the way his PTSD manifested was interesting. He didn’t seem to hesitate to put himself in danger (he joins up readily enough, and even when he’s having his freakout during the first gunfight, he’s not running away), but rather can’t seem to bring himself to pull the trigger. It seems that the twenty-something kills in a single day of battle that someone mentioned about him took its toll.
Faraday, meanwhile, has little issue killing, but a hit-and-run line he gives while talking to Emma about shooting a person implies that he has nightmares about it himself. But like everything else Faraday does, he sets it up like a joke or a quip, like a defense mechanism.
The line of riflemen in the trench and the Gatling gun reminded me of some aspects of World War I battles, but I wonder if those tactics were learned from Civil War battles, given that several of the combatants were Civil War veterans.
A lot of the stuff associated with WWI, to include automatic weapons, trench warfare, and the use of tunneling to set explosives under enemy fortifications, all happened in the Civil War. And really, I’d be surprised if the practice of digging trenches didn’t exist long before that, as they’d provide advantages even to a line of musketeers if their goal was to defend a fixed position.
FYI, the Japanese Magnificient Seven was ‘The 7 Samurai’ (1954 directed by Akira Kurosawa). and is very good. Pretty much the same story, though.
Bob
Merging two topics about this.
Thanks!
It was Lincoln, Kansas.
Trench digging has long been a staple of sieges, where sappers try to dig a trench up to the wall (of a castle or town) to try and undermine the supports.