As you have forgotten, or may have just never heard,Apple is making a movie based on The Oregon Trail educational game. It’s an odd idea to begin with, but gets weirder when you factor in it isset to be an action-comedy-musical(the closest example of this probably beingBarbie), and that there is already a horror movie called Oregon Trail, although this is based on the actual trail and not the game.
It’s a strange idea, but not inherently a bad one.I loved Barbie, despite the fact it was born to advertise toy dolls, because of how irreverent it was. Unlike whatthe Until Dawn adaptation seems to be doing, it took Barbie as a character seriously and gave her a real story. The Oregon Trail might do that too, and the directorial duo of Will Speck and Josh Gordon (best known for Blades of Glory, but most recently in family-friendly mode with Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile) gives me hope. But someone already made the perfect Oregon Trail movie, and it’s not Oregon Trail. It’s Meek’s Cutoff.
Meek’s Cutoff Captures The Dangerous Emptiness Of The Old West
Kelly Reichardt’s 2010 western is (like the horror version) not based on The Oregon Trail video game, but takes place during the same time period and details folks making their way along the fated trail, looking for water. They hire a man, Stephen Meek, who claims to know the trail well. When the party appears to get lost and runs short of water, tensions rise.
Meek’s Cutoff is a slow movie, arguably too slow. Little happens in it. The Oregon Trail mostly tries to recreate the reality of life on the trail, with several issues befalling your trip, but as a result each journey is perilously exciting. Meek’s Cutoff doesn’t feature companions dying of dysentery every few days, or wagons stuck in a river. They just need water. And they don’t have it. And they keep going. And they still don’t have it.
It’s not trying to be a like for like adaptation, and also focuses more on the dynamics of the journey - the men feuding, the women silenced - but it is easily the closest movie I’ve seen to understanding that adventure was not commonplace in frontier times, and that the Wild West was rarely all that wild for most folks. It’s a movie that features no villain, and a singular cause. We are Here, we need to make it to There. All that stands in the way is the In Between.
The Oregon Trail Movie Will Do Its Own Thing
Of course, The Oregon Trail movie probably won’t be anything like Meek’s Cutoff. There are dozens of versions of The Oregon Trail, which all vary in tone,despite the obvious dread they all inevitably havein a game about a hazardous journey where most perish to illness or the elements. It will be more vibrant, faster paced, with a greater degree of mass appeal. It will also, for reasons I still don’t understand, feature musical numbers.
It may even prove to be a better film than Meek’s Cutoff. The western is not a perfect movie by any stretch - I’d call it a mix of The Searchers and Women Talking, and find it inferior to both of those. I believevideo game movies have as much potential to be greatas movies inspired by any other source, and while ‘let’s do a movie about our toy’ islearning the wrong lessons from Barbie, The Oregon Trail is not a seat-filler IP, despite its name brand recognition. It strikes me as not the sort of thing you’d make a movie about unless you had a lot of passion and a great idea.
But until then, it’s hard to imagine a movie that sums up my own experience with The Oregon Trail any better than Meek’s Cutoff. It’s slow, it’s boring, it’s dangerous. You don’t understand it, but you keep going anyway. You don’t know what happens when you get there, and you’re not sure if the reward is worth the wait. But you need to see it through. With everything in you, you need to see it through.
