In the 21st century, some film directors are showing their predilection for that western of decades ago. In his report The mythical vision of the American epic still survives.

Viggo Mortesen in Until the End of the World is one of the latest examples. Kevin Costner also recovers his hobby in Horizon: An American Saga. The genre has risen from the ashes of disinterest in the 21st century. And like any rebirth, there are aspects of the tradition that endure and others that are revised.

On the one hand, this phenomenon of reappropriation of the western is aesthetically identifiable and intentional. Stagecoaches, wagons, ramshackle towns, ranches, rolling plants, saloons, stables and the desert are still present in the universe.

In that space, the western told the History of the United States in core topic of collective feat, defining the "American" identity. That explains why, at the same time, American war cinema prolonged its dominance in the tragic aspect. Once the conquest of the West was over, that same people would continue to assume the role of sheriff of the world, risking on the border of ideologies and religions, defending the Law against the autonomy of the individual, democracy as the best possible political organization against the power of the strongest and freedom in a version of the western that is more tarnished and critical of itself.

But not everything is reduced to a handful of romantic clichés. One of the most valuable aspects of the western is the creation of human archetypes. One would be the "frontiersman," represented by Ethan Edwards from Centaurs of the Desert. Edwards embodies heroism and two ethical positions that do not necessarily coincide: that of outsider and that of outlaw. Subsequently, that "apparently bad good" will validate the protagonist of Unforgiven. In this new western there is a retreat to the old essences for some reason.

This genre – originally literary – was invented by the Puritan colonists of the East, under the providentialist slogan of "manifest destiny".

Put on the lips of journalists such as John O'Sullivan, it offered the arguments that legitimized and justified territorial expansionism as a transcendental duty for the Democratic citizen. The western owes a lot to the work of the press in the territory. This fact is present in the plots of films such as News from the Great World, which tells the story of a girl captive by Native Americans.

The genre has also created icons. Events such as the construction of the railroad to California, the Civil War – which placed the fight against slavery and the Union in parallel – the annexation of Texas and its attempts at independence and the creation of Indian reservations are some of those milestones that seek to cohere the country with a common narrative of value, contradiction, sacrifice and innovation.

Likewise, the western (originating in the Westward stories, the stories of the conquest of the West) witnessed the birth of cinema. Authors such as Bret Harte characterized characters that would later jump to the screen. That mythology is full of bandits, cattle rustlers, trappers, sheriffs, outsiders, cowboys... People with expansionist, adventurous interests, driven by necessity or greed.

Another great topic of the western is the whitewashing of the criminal. Thus the dime novels, ten-cent serialized novels, which delighted children, stand out. The border becomes a mental, spiritual and political symbol. Skepticism and ambiguity coexist in a hero with a fierce code of honor. John Ford, Howard Hawks, Sam Peckinpah, Anthony Mann, Sergio Leone or John Sturges resonate in this way, to mention canonical classics to which we owe the new knights-errant of the prairies.

Therefore, this genre is a narrative formula that explains the forging of a nation, while feeding, correcting, orienting, and falsifying it. The western is to the United States what tragedy is to Ancient Greece.

After a brief decline in the last decades of the twentieth century, the western has experienced a flourishing based on homage, demystification and interest in ordinary life.

For example, the admiration for the hero's sacrifice is appreciated in the remakes of The 3:10 Train or in True Grit. Novels and biographies are adapted into films with the intention of showing the maladjustment and other negative consequences of violence. There is room for the stories of the renegades of the civil war in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and also the two abominable faces of capitalism in the incomparable Wells of Ambition.

This rebirth of the genre brings its touch of modernity: the desacralization of nation-building, the attitude of the pioneers or the living conditions suffered.

Through other stories, such as that of Hugh Glass in The Revenant, what must have been the real struggle of man against wild nature in the frontier territories is reflected. Even new protagonists, such as Captain Joseph Blocker in Hostiles, show their psychological wound because of the violence they themselves have inflicted.

Some risky approaches are novel, such as Quentin Tarantino's in Django Unchained, where violence becomes language and the protagonist is black, or Tommy Lee Jones' in Debt of Honour, when he shows a non-heroic portrait of women who returned to the East because they did not know how to resist on those distant horizons.

In an inverse process, the figure of the explorer Martha Jane Canary-Burke, known as "Calamity Jane", is idealized.

The animated film Calamity is a beautiful aesthetic compendium of the issues that dominate the great American story. It is striking that the director In it, Chayé approaches the myth of Martha Jane Cannary by reading so intelligently the essential dance of the western between the physical journey and the inner journey, the solitude of the hero in the face of danger and the sense of community, the longing for adventure and the taste for the everyday, the mystique of a café over a campfire and the devouring beauty of an untamed nature that does not spare the weak.

In a more contemplative vein, director Kelly Reichardt documents the time of the western. Reichardt brings the value of uncertainty while de-dramatizing the real lives of families and hustlers in Meek's Cutoff and First Cow.

The western has been reborn in the twenty-first century, demystifying its cause or questioning with nostalgia and admiration some dark aspects of a history yet to be unmasked, of a fabulous, cruel and charming falsification of migrations.