COWBOYS & ALIENS

This picture is more fun than the movie

The title delivers on its promise.  There are cowboys; real ones too, not just men on horses with guns, but men employed in the cattle industry.  And there are aliens.  But beyond that, it doesn't deliver much else.  The film is an awkward attempt to bridge two genres without having any fun.  For such a ludicrous premise, and one that gets infinitely more ridiculous as the film winds down, the film is awfully serious.  I can't believe that they decided to combine Men In Black with Wild Wild West and instead of saying 'Hey lets make it fun' they said 'Oh that's so badass we have to take it super seriously.'

Good luck figuring out, or even guessing, who made any of those decisions.  The expression 'too many cooks' might as well have been invented to describe this film.  Jon Favreau (the director), Ron Howard, Brian Grazer, Ryan Kavanaugh, Steven Spielberg, and a few of the writers have producing credits.  The credits list Alex Kurtzman & Roberto Orci and Damon Lindelof and Mark Fergus & Hawk (Hawk?) Ostby as writers, with the screen story by Mark Fergus & Hawk Ostby and Steve Odekerk.  The internets claim there were even more uncredited writers like David Hayter, Thompson Evans, Jeffrey Boam, Chris Hauty, Thomas Donnelly & Josh Oppenheimer, and more.  If you don't know, let me fill you in that the '&' symbol means they worked together and the word 'and' means they worked separately.  Also let me fill you in that the name Steve Odekerk means they did at one point consider making this film a comedy, albeit most likely a dreadful one.

IMDB says that Steven Spielberg screened The Searchers and Close Encounters of the Third Kind for writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, who previously have blessed us with the Transformers films.  I don't think they showed up, but even if they did, what about the other 45 writers who had a say in this thing?  And is it weird for a producer to show his own movie to people and just say 'do something like this'?  Is it weird when they botch it this badly?  And this might seem like too obvious a point, but aren't the aliens benevolent in Close Encounters?  Shouldn't he have screened them The War of the Worlds?  Or did he forget he made that one?  That's no big deal I forget that one all the time.  Something made the writers decide to cut any fun out, because I glanced over the wiki page for the comic this movie is based on, and I saw references to flying horses and energy whips which sound a whole hell of a lot more entertaining that whatever happened in this movie.

IMDB even further tests my gullibility (or maybe my incredulity) by claiming that Daniel Craig was cast because of his resemblance to Yul Brynner, star of the classic The Magnificent Seven.  Uhhh.... No he doesn't...  What am I missing?  They should have just compared each cast member to a random actor from past Westerns.  Actually they fucking did.  Jon Favreau compared having Harrison Ford in this movie to John Wayne, because....  hmmm...  that's a good question.  Because John Wayne made countless Westerns and Harrison Ford has been in a whopping two of them?  Or because they're both old?  One is a lot older than the other.  If you wanted to say he's old, so old in fact that the first person you think of to compare him to has been dead for thirty fucking years, then just tell him 'hey Harrison Ford I think you're old as shit!'  No need to cast him in this dud to prove your point.

Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford glower and un-emote their way through an underdeveloped story.  How overqualified is the supporting cast that probably signed on to the movie just for the chance to smoke out with Harrison Ford?  Really really.  Paul Dano plays Ford's son, who uses his father's reputation to get drunk and shoot up the town.  If a Western needs a little classing up, go ahead and throw in a Carradine, Keith in this case as the Sheriff, or a Sam Rockwell, as a fearful saloon keeper.  Adam Beach is Ford's adopted son, Clancy Brown is the town minister, Walt Goggins is a henchman and Olivia Wilde is a magic lady who pushes the plot forward when necessary.

Even some of the really, really small parts are filled with ringers.  Toby Huss, perhaps best known as Artie The Strongest Man in the World or Cotton Hill or The Wiz on Seinfeld, shows up as a crude drunk, the traditional first survivor of an extraterrestrial encounter.  David O'Hara, the off-the-boat psycho Fitzy from The Departed and also the guy in Braveheart that yells "This is my island!" shows up very briefly as an unwise usurper.  Raoul Trujillo, unforgettable as the villain Zero Wolf in Apocalypto, gets to slum it for a paycheck as a generic hooting and hollering Apache, who can cure plot-induced amnesia with peyote and revive friendly aliens by setting them on fire.

The aliens are far less impressive than the supporting cast.  They seem to only punch and kick and bite their opponents, so maybe Daniel Craig stole their one and only gun.  Shoulda kept a better eye on that thing.  The aliens are here to steal people, but only so they can make them stand in a little room.  I guess maybe they were gonna do something with them later, like eat them or probe them, but they're all just standing around in a room looking bored when they get rescued.  The aliens are also stealing our gold, maybe to sell to the Pyschlos.  No really, they want our gold so much they take people's teeth.  They also seem to have robbed a gigantic riverboat casino, and then left the boat upside down in a desert hundreds of miles away from any river.  Well that sounds like an interesting story; tell us about that instead!

Olivia Wilde announces 'the aliens underestimate you' in some sort of strange attempt to kill all the suspense that wasn't being generated anyway.  And yet, the aliens seem pretty dumb.  Like many movie aliens, they are capable of interstellar travel, and yet never wear clothes or use tools or language, preferring to punch and kick whilst people unload bullets at them.  But most hilariously, they have a second set of tiny T-rex-style arms; the only downside is they have to open up their chest cavity to use them, revealing all their internal organs.  Does that sound like too big a trade-off to ever possibly be useful?  Well you're right.  But don't tell the aliens.  One of them chases a kid into a hole, the kid hides, and the alien can't reach him.  So he opens his chest, and reaches in with his smaller arms to see if he can grab the kid.  Well even a stupid kid knows what to do when the monster trying to kill him is also coincidentally revealing all its internal organs.

This film shares a strange similarity with the completely different but also terrible movie The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: a CGI hummingbird showing up for inspiration; no better symbol for a cloying, unnecessary, and unearned tug at the heartstrings than that.