Although I’m a big fan of DC comics, I’ve never followed the Jonah Hex comic book, so I can’t speak of this movie’s fidelity to the source material. And normally I wouldn’t review a western, but the previews for this movie indicated some clearly supernatural elements that made it a good fit for the kind of movies I review. Jonah Hex is about a man in the 1800’s whose family was killed in front of him and who is now a bounty hunter, trying to punish criminals to make himself feel a little better. But when it is revealed that his family’s killer, once thought dead, is still alive, Jonah drops everything to hunt him down. Oh yeah, and a hooker with a heart of… well, she’s got a heart and she’s tagging along because she likes Jonah, or something. This is going to be a short review because I found this movie extremely forgettable. I don’t remember a single interesting character. Hex was most interesting in the flashbacks dealing with the death of his family. Otherwise,...

Along with being entertainment, movies are also an outlet for the expression of one’s worldview. Most movies have a protagonist and an antagonist. Someone the film-maker wants us to root for, and someone else he wants us to root against. Protagonists may be flawed, but the storytellers give them enough of what they view as positive qualities that we will sympathize with them. Antagonists may not be completely evil, but storytellers give them enough “bad” characteristics that we can tell we shouldn’t root for them. By picking up on these kinds of basic story elements that we take for granted, we can determine quite a bit about the moral and philosophical worldview of the creators of a film. Some creators want their worldview to be expressed and appreciated by their audience. While other creators simply let their worldviews “leak out” in their creations by accident. I’m not assuming George Lucas had any desire to mold the thinking of his viewers. But his movies have presented a ...