I haven't commented here yet, largely because I just don't know what to say. I am relatively certain that the first half of this film is flawless, or very nearly so. The thing that strikes me most, I think, is that it builds tension without the typical tricks of the trade. It doesn't use excessively gimmicky camera angles or overt musical cues to tell us when to be alert. We know exactly what's happening, and the events in and of themselves produce the tension.
Yoda, I respect all to hell your knowledge of movies, and I know where you're coming from in the lack of fancy camera angles and musical cues. But to an ol' boy like me who grew up in and knows that part of Texas (I used to date an ol' gal who lived in Marfa; she later became my first ex-wife and she and our daughter lived there for years), the first quarter of the film had lots of things that I couldn't help wondering about. I know this wouldn't matter to most of you who have seen the movie, but:
When that hunter starts tracking that wounded antelope, I'm asking myself, "What's he gonna do when he finds it--carry it piggy-back back to his pickup?" Tracking the blood trail is one thing, but when he gets to wherever the animal bled out, he's gonna wish he had a pickup to haul it back with. I don't think that animal could have gotten so far, and certainly the blood trail wouldn't have ended after crossing that of the wounded dog.
Why didn't he have some water when he found the surviving Mexican drug runner? You go walking in the heat of the sun in West Texas without a canteen, and you're just begging for sunstroke and heat exhaustion.
Who later came back and killed that survivor and took all those drug packets out of the pickup? Shifting a pickup bed-full of any material is hard and tiring work under that desert sun. It would be much, much easier and faster to just drive off in the loaded pickup. Provided it would still run. But to find out if it would run, you'd have to pull the wounded man out of the driver's seat. But they didn't--just shot out the side window to kill a dying man.
But the biggest question to me is how did that Barney Fife deputy single-handedly capture that psycho killer at the start of that movie. I mean he takes that air-tank weapon away from him and gets him handcuffed--how did he manage that and then is dumb enough to sit with his back to the suspect so he can sneak up on him? Why didn't the killer make a break before then? There was no way he could know how many people would be at the sheriff's office when they arrived. Even little ol' West Texas towns have dispatchers and jailers and often visiting state highway patrolmen on the premises who could help fight off an attacker. But I did like all the heel scuffs on the floor after the deputy was killed. That was a nice, realistic touch to an otherwise strange event.
The air-tank weapon was a nice odd touch, an innovation worthy of Hitchcock. But not practical for a real killer. It's awkward, bulky, attracts attention, and apparently is only effective up close and then mostly to bust up cheap door locks. Anything more than a few inches away, and he has to go for a long gun.
There were some other things, like why did he kill the two guys who brought him to the shootout scene? They obviously were all working for the same drug lord or cartel. Why drop them at the scene of the shoot-out, which gives the authorities 20 more chances to identify a fingerprint and start connecting the dead to their still-living associates? The guy may have been crazy, but he was more cunning than that.
Like I said, most viewers don't worry about such things; no reason they should. But I couldn't help wonder. I also noticed some land features that are not typical of West Texas, particularly one shot of sort of rolling hills. West Texas is generally flat like the hunting and shoot-out locations (and there are lots of antelope over around Alpine and Marfa). The hills must have been shot over in New Mexico.
But I did like the movie. Just probably not as much as the rest of the forum.