We're led to believe that Pike and his crew are crafty outlaws, and given their longevity this would seem to bear up. Why, then, do the four of them insist on taking on Mapache in the morning, after they've woken up? Why not attack him and his men when they were close to passing out from drinking the night before?
Then again, maybe they weren't so crafty. Thornton outwits them during the bank ambush, after all. Pike and Dutch are the only ones with any brains left after that, and the Gorch brothers probably would've gotten them killed at some point on their own.
I need to read a book...
I'm familiar with the metaphor present. The Wild Bunch is taught alongside Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in film classes when discussing themes of the modern Western. Pike and Dutch make the resignation to their fates abundantly clear during the campfire scene when each discusses how they "wouldn't have had it any other way."
I was (poorly) attempting to be a smart ass, is all. And I didn't respect the fact that they most likely knew that attacking in that fashion meant Angel, the young idealist, was going to die as well.
The Wild Bunch is a metaphor for the death of the Wild West. From the opening scene - a scorpion being dragged down by ants even though it kills many of its attackers - we know this can only end in one bad-ass smorgasbord of gunfire and splattering gore.
With all this talk of motorcars and airplanes, Pike knows the times have passed him and his boys by. They know they are part of another age, where people and events were larger than life. As they sit around in their baths agonizing over this, they come to a group decision: their time is over. They can't change to fit the times; they're unwilling to fade away into obscurity -- so only one course of action remains, and that's to go out in the proverbial blaze of glory.
Pike and his men know they're going to die in the final confrontation. They choose to attack when they do because it makes for a good exit scene for them. Yes, they could have massacred the encampment in the night, but they're not looking for a victory. They're looking to go out as legends, so that history will at least remember them.
Thornton is very similar to Pike, but different in one important respect. The times have also passed him by as well, but he's more flexible. He can accept a change in his role in the universe, and so he survives. His intelligence and adaptability lets him continue on where the dinosaurs perish. But he's not so different from the Wild Bunch that he can't appreciate what they did, and why, and how.
As I said, the movie is a metaphor. Just as the characters of the Wild West have died, the Wild West itself dies then too. But, elements of it continue on into the future in a different form.
I think it's a beautiful movie, and not just because blood sprays copiously. Although that's pretty cool too.