Summer 2011 has really been out of this world for producer Steven Spielberg. Although the most powerful filmmaker on the planet hasn’t deigned to sit in the director’s chair himself, that Spielberg sheen has dominated our movie screens nonetheless, with three collaborations with other directors, and a slight sense that the chap is running out of ideas. We’ve had automobile aliens fighting off the onslaught of vehicular villains in Michael Bay’s Transformers: Dark of the Moon. Then we had some good old-fashioned Goony-fun as a mysterious monster from beyond the stars rips a town to shreds in J.J. Abrams’ Super 8. And now, taking the Ronseal approach to film titles, Spielberg produces director Jon Favreau’s Cowboys & Aliens, which is, unsurprisingly, about cowboys and aliens.
But to say that this is Spielberg’s show is a tad unfair, as Favreau’s style dominates the film, and the Iron Man man clearly stamps his sense of dry humour and gritty emotion onto this loose interpretation of a 2006 graphic novel of the same name.
It’s 1873, New Mexico, and Daniel Craig awakens in the middle of the desert, no memory of who he is, why he’s such a badass, and how he got an oversized bangle on his wrist. Making his way to the town of Absolution, it’s not long before he’s revealed as being Jake Lonergan, wanted felon, and rubbing cattle-driver and town boss Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford) up the wrong way. But just as the local sheriff is sending him off to face justice in Santa Fe, aliens attack the backwater town, kidnapping numerous citizens with metallic lassos in some sort of intergalactic rodeo, and Lonergan and the survivors ride out in search of their people, while a mysterious woman (Olivia Wilde) may hold the key to unlocking the mystery.
Cowboys & Aliens went through numerous rewrites, starting off a Robert Downey Jr. showcase of sarsaparilla slapstick, before Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman’s treatment toned down the broader laughs to make space for some action, and for a while this works. The opening scene, replete with flies buzzing around the fetid skullcaps of some unfortunate Injuns, feels dirty, in the way that Westerns should. But this gives way to a rather formulaic plot, with the character going from A (alien attack) to B (ballsy rescue attempt) to C (canyon-based climax) in a predictable and uninspiring way.
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Problems also abound when the film makes lazy attempts to pull the rug from under our feet, in twists so obvious that audience members who’ve left to go to the bathroom won’t even need to be informed that their assumptions have proven sound. This is particularly true of Ella, much in the same vein as the last enigmatic female-role played by Olivia Wilde in Tron: Legacy, whose big reveal and plot-exposition are rather unsatisfying. But not as bad as what’s happened to the abducted masses (redundant) or the reason why this advanced alien-civilisation have come halfway across the universe in the first place, a plot point so bizarrely insignificant that its boggles the mind. Effectively, there’s more gold in them there hills than there is in this script.
On the acting side, the performers are all decent. Daniel Craig, whose ice-cold glare is made for a character like this, reminds us just why his Bourne-again Bond has real aggressive chops, and does a nice side-line in understated comedy that’s dryer than the dessert. Harrison Ford plays a different character in every scene he’s in, ranging from embittered town brute to emotional father figure, but there’s never any clear sense of who he really is. Sam Rockwell may as well not be there for all the screen time his neglected Doc gets, and the whole show gets stolen by the epic New Mexican landscapes and creepy character design for the aliens – though their secret body parts, initially worthy of squirming rounds of applause, are overused and lose their impact.
While the film never drags, it never really thrills either, and a rushed all-guns-blaring finale where meaningless extras suffer while all the heroes get a one-scene salute to justify their paycheques brings affairs to a disappointing conclusion.
3 Likes
Released Nationwide: August 19th
Runtime: 118 mins
Certificate: 15A
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