The alien craze continues and this time it isn’t the military called on to take the invaders out, it’s a posse of cowboys led by a mysterious high plains drifter and a grouchy cattle rancher. Director Jon Favreau has tossed aside his Iron Man shackles and made way for another comic book adaptation, bringing sci-fi flavor to the Wild West with Cowboys and Aliens.
Set in 1873 in the hot and dusty Arizona Territory, we meet a nameless man (Daniel Craig) who wakes to the sun beating down on his face and a metal bracelet wrapped around his left wrist. Who he is and how he got there not even he knows, but as he stumbles into the nearby town of Absolution he soon learns that while he may not know who he is, others certainly know him. Fortunately for him, the people of Absolution have more important things to worry about.
As night falls, lights appear in the sky on the horizon and before you know it a swarm of alien ships are attacking the town, snatching people up with mechanical lassos and destroying everything in sight. When the wife of a local saloon owner (Sam Rockwell) and the son of the grizzled cattle rancher (Harrison Ford) are taken, the townsfolk form a posse and set off to save their loved ones. Joining them is the mysterious man that stumbled into town, a beautiful young girl with secrets of her own (Olivia Wilde), the son (The Last Airbender‘s Noah Ringer) of the kidnapped sheriff and a few others that don’t necessitate mention.
To this point I’ve been careful not to mention the word “Western” because honestly I never got much of a Western feel from this flick. Even before the aliens arrived I wasn’t convinced this was the Wild West at any moment, much of that reasoning has to do with Harry Gregson-Williams’ score. Gregson-Williams is a man whose work I enjoy, but he apparently isn’t the one to bring a Western to life. Favreau, however, chose well when he brought on Oscar-nominated Mary Zophres for his costumes after she put in such good work on the Coens’ True Grit, and there are no complaints on that end, but the overall feel of the film just didn’t sell a Western.
Equally distracting are the aliens, which now feel commonplace. Maybe that’s because of how many alien films we’ve seen lately. In just the last six months we’ve seen aliens with numbers, aliens stealing our mothers and alien robots trashing Chicago. On top of that there have been aliens hitchhiking with Comic Con geeks, destroying Los Angeles, homaging Steven Spielberg, attacking South London and delivering green magic rings. There comes a point when the magic wears off and Cowboys and Aliens happens to arrive at the tail end of this run and these aliens don’t do enough to differentiate themselves. Even worse, the characters in the film seem just as unsurprised by these space invaders as I was.
Where I found most of my enjoyment was in getting to know Harrison Ford’s character, a one-time Colonel turned cattle rancher with a misfit son (Paul Dano) and a short temper. While Ford’s gruff line-reading early in the film feels a bit forced, as the film moves on he begins to open up into a character that is about more than just being a hard ass. Oh, and Walt Goggins (“The Shield”) is fantastic in a small supporting role.
On the flipside, Daniel Craig’s performance was quite stale and unoriginal as he plays something of a Jason Bourne trapped in the 1800s. The first scene in the film is essentially a remake of the park bench scene from The Bourne Identity and instead of floating onto a fishing boat he stumbles into a priest’s office and needs to be patched up. Craig also seems so busy dropping his English accent he forgets to add any emotion to his character. Then again, perhaps that’s just how the character was written.
If the tone of this film feels somewhat familiar to you, perhaps that’s because the same people that brought you such films as Star Trek, Transformers and Iron Man teamed to write this thing. The script was adapted by no fewer than six screenwriters as Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, Damon Lindelof, Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby and Steve Oedekerk all had a hand in bringing the Platinum Studios Comics graphic novel to the big screen. Surprisingly, this often causes serious plot holes, but in that respect the story actually holds up, though you would hope if six people get together to write a film about aliens invading the Old West they could find a better reason for them to be doing so, or at least give us some sort of worthwhile explanation.
Overall, a lot of my harping is simply because I think this film could have been far more unique than it actually was. I would’ve hoped Favreau would have looked closer at some of Clint Eastwood’s or John Wayne’s westerns and tried to recreate that legitimate vibe of the dusty Wild West, and imagine what Bill Munny or Ethan Edwards would have done if alien spaceships started snatching up people around them. While we aren’t watching a team of marines hunt down the uninvited aliens we may as well be, since the only difference is these guys are packing six-shooters rather than laser-sighted machine guns. Hell, even a horse is able to keep up with the alien ships as far as this film is concerned.
I had fun with Cowboys and Aliens for what it was, but I was hoping for much, much more.
