Cowboys & Aliens
One would think that when you have a film that features a team up between Indiana Jones and (the current) James Bond, given the high concept of the title alone, you’d be sure to strike cinematic gold. Alas, that is not the case here, as a story that should have been a fun Western / Sci-fi hybrid turns out to be something so weighted down in its own self-importance that ultimately it becomes a bit of a chore for any viewer to sit through. Certainly that is a surprise coming from director Jon Favreau, whose Iron Man films put audience appeal as its foremost aim while delivering the goods on the action front, but what we get here is a dark, ultra-serious, and quite violent concoction weighted down by a bad script (with no less than SIX credited writers) ridden with cliché situations and corny dialogue. The cast is quite good though, and do the best they can with what they have. Daniel Craig as the lead outlaw / amnesiac seems to be channeling equal doses of both Clint Eastwood and Steve McQueen, truly proving he has the presence and the chops to be a major star outside of 007, but his basic character development through mostly flashbacks offers very little insight. Likewise, Harrison Ford should be commended for doing something different with his ranch owner who controls the town (usually the villain in these types of stories), growling out his lines in ornery fashion, it’s just that the character has little if anything interesting to say. The first 20 minutes are literally the best part, setting up the characters and situations well, and introducing a damn good supporting cast with quality actors like Clancy Brown, Paul Dano, Sam Rockwell, and Keith Carradine, along with the ethereally beautiful Olivia Wilde as a mysterious woman with a secret you can see coming from a million miles away. But when the aliens themselves show up out of nowhere, swooping down and kidnapping various people who seem to be of great importance (and given that guns are useless against them save for Craig who has some kind of laser blaster attached to his wrist), as does the movie itself start to get away from the viewer, as those who remain form a posse to bring the others back. What follows is a film with a painfully tedious pace, including an overnight campout in an upside down ship in the middle of the desert (with no explanation) taking nearly 25 minutes of screentime alone, featuring endless dialogue coupled with a barely visible alien attack. What makes things worse is the aliens’ motivation: They’ve come here to mine for gold (just as rare in the rest of the universe as it is on our planet) which begs the question: why not keep a low profile instead of also going out and provoking the indigenous lifeforms (us) on the planet as well? With the answer being, naturally, they want to experiment on us also, by far not the only cliché that the screenplay serves up. I suppose it’s meant to be heartwarming when the cowboys form an alliance with Craig’s old gang of outlaws as well as a tribe of Indians to take on the aliens in one unified force, but the final battle as filmed by Favreau is a complete and utter mess, a spectacle of extras on horseback being liberally splattered all over the place (with the odd alien kill here and there) during which time all the important characters manage to survive! Granted, much of the special FX showing the spaceship and advanced technology is nice, even if the aliens themselves are your typical snarling beasts whose greatest ability is to slaughter their human opposition with little to no thought given to them being an actual advanced species. Overall, a major disappointment, and a film that probably bombed at the box office because it didn’t live up to being the fun spectacle that its title / premise promised, needing to be less like The Searchers and more like Independence Day…
5/10