The Wild Bunch

I thought that this movie was the most interesting one so far since reading break. I liked it because it wasn’t in a documentary style, and just in general, the way it was directed, it was more interesting than the movie last week.
I watched the movie with subtitles and I thought that it was weird that they didn’t translate the Spanish dialogue into English. I understand that they were in Mexico most of the time and the director probably wanted to capture as much of the culture as possible (I think that this is why I liked the movie better than last week where the culture was pretty much just shown in the beginning), so they wanted to have people speaking in Spanish. But there were entire conversations that went on for a few minutes that weren’t translated, for example when Teresa and Angel are talking, so it made me wonder who the audience was meant to be, and if all of them were expected to understand both languages. The rest of the movie seemed to aim towards Americans, language-wise, for example, when they said the word ‘gringo,’ they usually surrounded it with English so that the audience could understand them.
I also thought it was weird that the only American women in the movie were in the beginning in the Temperance Union, and the rest of the woman were Mexican, and half of them were naked most of the time. I don’t know what the movie’s trying to say, because it wasn’t really the common message that Americans are superior...Angel was Mexican and he was always part of the family to the group. No matter what country they were in, all of the groups were just looking for the “prize” whether it be money or guns, and race didn’t matter. In fact, the rich and powerful people were mainly Mexican, the General.
This wasn’t extremely obvious to me until the end, but there was a kind of layering effect that ended up being kind of humourous. Like I said before, all of the groups were looking for a prize of some sort. It ended up being a kind of chase, but each team was different. The ‘wild bunch’ was really smart,and in the bounty hunter group, there was only one smart guy and the rest weren’t as capable, and the soldiers were rich but stupid, which was obvious when they were trying out the machine gun and when they tried to convince the wild bunch to follow them to the General – in that part, the wild bunch outsmarted them. So in the end, you might have thought that the rich people would have won because they had money, and now guns, and that the bounty hunters would have continued to lose, or maybe you wouldn’t have thought that, but what happened was that for the most part the General and his followers died first, and then the wild bunch, and then for the most part, the bounty hunters. Only one person from the two bottom groups survived, and the people from the Mexican town, who were considered the weakest because they didn’t have weapons. Most of them survived, except Angel and Teresa, who had left the town to try to be something bigger.