Review: Cowboys and Aliens

One of the summers many big, highly anticipated blockbusters looks into a question many of us have wondered about; mainly what would happen if cowboys took on aliens. This cross genre mash up set in 1870s Arizona sees mysterious outlaw, Jake (Daniel Craig) and town bigwig Woodrow Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford) battle an alien invasion to save the town and as is always the case the entire world. Daniel Craig pulls off his best Clint Eastwood impression, silent, rough around the edges, ‘don’t mess with me or I’ll mess with your face’ action star and he confidently leads the film although perhaps he’s more James Bond in a Stetson than Blondie. Still he is entertaining and offered some of the best bits in the film.

There is some stab at character development and indications of emotional depth but these are sadly under developed and serve only to tick off the character clichés film viewers are all too familiar with, to leave room for the big expensive CGI sequences. Sam Rockwell co-stars as a ‘Doc’ fulfilling the role of educated ‘coward’. It always pains me to see such a wonderful, gifted actor limited by his material but he is likeable and as expected has his moment to use the gun-toting skills he learns. Harrison Ford is similarly confined to a stereotype, the grumpy, outwardly hard, inwardly soft and fluffy, general with a hypocritical hatred of battle that is contradictory to some of the earlier scenes in the film.

Director, Jon Favreau (Iron Man) sticks to his guns by keeping the film regrettably modern. A more interesting film may have offered a more striking juxtaposition of late 19^th century American west with the futuristic alien culture rather than delivering gangsters dressed up in western gear taking on unfortunately unoriginal ‘district 9’ type aliens that modern audiences are all too familiar with. It was not as successful a mash up as I would have liked, arguably being neither true to western nor Sci-Fi genre. The film introduces the first alien encounter too early making the pacing of the rest of the film an issue and the story arc a little laboured.

However, having said that I went to the cinema to see cowboys fight aliens and that is exactly what I got. Subsequent expectations of what the film could have been are possibly not the points to dwell on. Was it ridiculous? Yes. Was it far fetched? Yes. Was it all just a bit superficial? Yes. BUT at some point you do need to pause and acknowledge the fact that you are watching something called ‘Cowboys and Aliens’! Whoever was expecting Oscar worthy, ground breaking, genre smashing cinema probably thought ‘Snakes on a plane’ would be a life changing epic on the political and religious dangers of air travel that was robbed of its deserved awards. It delivered on my expectations and although they could have done more with the concept and it was sadly lacking in originality, it was entertaining. It was big, dumb fun that is definitely worth a DVD viewing.


KO