Cowboys & Aliens
starring Daniel
Craig, Harrison Ford, and Olivia Wilde
directed by Jon
Favreau
screenplay by
Damon Lindelof, Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci, Mark Fergus, and Hawk
Ostby
Dreamworks
(2011)
I
get the feeling that Hollywood, at least for a lucky few, is a like a
giant playground in which filmmakers get to play in sandboxes of
their own making. There's no greater evidence of this than to sit
down and watch Cowboys &
Aliens. Between this and
superhero movies like Daredevil
and Iron
Man, it seems Jon
Favreau has a knack for convincing studios to give him big bags of
money so he can run off and play dress-up with friends and film
icons.
The
very title, Cowboys &
Aliens, quite literally
tells you everything you need to know about this movie. There are
cowboys, and they fight aliens. If you attempt to watch this movie in
order to glean anything beyond that, you're not only wasting your
time, you really ought to seek psychiatric help because you'd have to
be crazy to think the movie is anything other than pure B-movie fare
with an A-list budget.
Based on a graphic novel that was actually pitched as a movie
originally, the movie revolves are Daniel Craig as a cowboy with no
memory and a strange metal bracelet locked around his wrist. When he
gets into the dustbowl town of Absolution, he learns his name is Jake
and he's a wanted man who has run afoul of a cattle barren. As things
go downhill for Jake, it gets worse for everyone when the aliens
attack and abduct random townsfolk. After that, it's up to everyoen
to band together and track down the aliens and save the day.
As far as the plot goes, the movie is what you'd expect from your
usual summer fare. Lots of things blowing up, lots of fights, a lot
of machismo and one-liners, and a scant amount of character
development. Everyone in the movie seems to play to their typecasts:
Daniel Craig plays it cool and mysterious, Harrison Ford is gruff and
confrontational, Olivia Wilde is hot, and Sam Rockwell is quirky.
Beyond that, everyone is driven purely with fighting aliens.
As
for the little green men, they aren't that little--or green. They
actually reminded me a bit of the alien villain from Men
In Black, kind of buggy
and reptilian at the same time. It's their motivation that struck me
as a tad original in an alien invasion movie, and totally befitting a
western. I won't spoil it beyond that, but if you saw it then you
know what I mean.
The action scenes, especially the big showdown at the end, is where I
had the biggest problem with the movie. I mean aside from the fancy
bracelet Jakes wears, which is actually an alien weapon, the humans
are severely outmatched and inexplicably put up a serious fight
against the aliens. I mean, I'm really surprised an alien force
wouldn't zap the humans into oblivion the moment they posed any kind
of serious threat. Instead, they keep toying with them almost, like
they still don't believe the humans can do any damage, despite doling
a lot of it through their encounters.
Bah,
I over-analyze. Unlike a preposterous film like Transformers
or Cloverfield,
this movie had a likeability to it, and I dare say a little heart.
More heart than those other films, at any rate. Thanks to the
on-screen presence of the lead actors, the movie avoids tripping into
total farce. I just don't know if the movie is worth watching more
than once, but I would recommend fans of weird westerns and alien
invasion flicks see it ... once.
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