Movie Review: Cowboys and Aliens
Jon Favreau’s Cowboys & Aliens is the equivalent of putting Independence Day and The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly together and getting The English Patient. Westerns are great, sci-fi’s are wonderful, and yet this failed attempt to bring them together has resulted in a plain, flat movie. The script is a jumbled mess, all of the adjacent storylines are uninteresting, the action is lifeless, there’s not much room for lead actors Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford to do much beyond snarl and frown. Despite all of these problems, the movie doesn’t do anything truly horrendous other than waste two hours of your time.
There are five adjacent storylines and none of them are particularly interesting. Part of the problem is that we barely learn anything about the characters and they hardly ever interact with each other. There’s no banter, there’s no complex relationships, and even though they share scenes, they hardly ever speak to each other. It’s the most basic screenwriting the writers of the film could muster: here’s what these characters want (and everyone’s motives become vague by the third act). No one bothered to make you care and no one considered mixing a couple of the storylines so we could invest in a smaller group of characters.
But that’s just part of the script’s many, MANY problems. No one seems to understand the nuances of either genre beyond “Cowboys wear spears and ride horses, Aliens have spaceships and use futuristic weapons.” There’s no genuine attempt to have the genres interact in a cool, meaningful way beyond “Look at how technology changes the connection between the conqueror and the conquered.” The story even goes so far as to reveal that the aliens are after our gold. For that analogy to hold true, it would mean that a single Native American armed only with one rifle could have taken down the first European settlers.
Another problem is that the aliens’ motives and the characters’ understanding of the aliens changes from scene to scene. We eventually learn that the aliens are abducting humans so they can study us and learn our weaknesses before beginning the actual invasion (our weaknesses? Like what? Being shot and stabbed?). But their ship is still mining gold. Are the aliens just thoughtful multi-taskers who figure “Hey, as long as we’re on this science expedition, may as well get some gold.” Later on, a character says that the best way to fight the aliens is to draw them out into broad daylight since they’re subterranean creatures. When the aliens come outside to fight the humans, they have no problem fighting in the daytime and the proceeding battle shows the humans struggling to defeat the creatures. Oddly, bullets don’t do much but a charge with a wooden spear seems to do the trick.
Favreau looked like he was improving sense Iron Man 2, but Cowboys & Aliens is a gigantic step in the wrong direction. The climactic battle is repetitive, only one of the big alien kills is worth celebrating (and it’s telegraphed so apparently throughout the film that it’s not much of a surprise), and Lonergan’s big fight against multiple aliens is terribly static and sadly underwhelming considering he’s the film’s “hero”.
I’ve gone on about the film’s faults for almost two pages and yet I could keep going about the film’s problems but perhaps its greatest advantage is that I just didn’t care about anything. The movie ran for about two hours, and nothing in it aroused positive or negative feelings in me. It was just there and while I could see its many flaws, the tone is so muddled and unenthusiastic that at most I felt like I was part of a half-assed experiment, came to the conclusion that it didn’t work out, and then I was allowed to go home. This movie had the potential for a good brainless action summer blockbuster, but the only thing it seemed to get right was the brainless. If you have $12 to burn and 2 hours to kill, and don’t care where you spend it, then hey this is the film for you.
I give it 2 out of 5…
By Jacob Wilson