Cowboys and Aliens

The Friday before we left on our vacation (the 29th, I believe), my mom and I went to the theaters to see one of the few titles coming out this summer that looked interesting: Cowboys and Aliens.

When I saw the trailer for this movie sometime last year, I thought it looked hokey, and wanted to see it, just to have fun with the ridiculousness of it. The title was an obvious play off of "Cowboys and Indians" - as someone who likes words, I can appreciate the fact that 'Indians' and 'Aliens' sound similar and have the same number of syllables - and the movie premise sounded like something made up on the spot for a silly, would-be blockbuster, like Megashark versus Giant Octopus.

'Which, according to this chart, means it should be great!'

The more I looked into the movie, however, the more I realized that they actually intended this to be a serious, well-thought-out, and meaningful story, not just a campy thriller. As shown on the graph above, this, I thought, would move Cowboys and Aliens from the so-bad-it's-good bump to the slump to the left.

However, with all the boring or stupid movies coming out this summer, Cowboys and Aliens looked at least sort of promising, so we made our way to the theater with the tickets we pre-paid for (if we buy non-specific movie tickets through her school, my mom gets a percentage for her classroom, so we bought a few last spring, figuring we'd be seeing movies this summer anyways).

Daniel Craig plays the main character of Cowboys and Aliens, a solemn man who wakes up in the middle of the Wild West desert with a strange metal device attached to his arm, unable to remember even his own name. He soon makes it to a nearby town called Absolution, where he befriends a preacher and learns that a rich rancher named Woodrow Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford) owns most of the town and is feared by most of the people who live there.

Daniel Craig's character also soon learns that he is a outlaw named Jake Lonergan, wanted for stealing quite a bit of gold from Dolarhyde. Unfortunately for Dolarhyde, the town is attacked by a strange, otherworldly force (read: the titular aliens) before they can send Jake to the county prison. Jake is able to bring down one of the alien ships with the weapon hidden in his iron bracelet, which seems to be made from alien technology, but not before the aliens kidnap a number of the town residents, including Dolarhyde's undisciplined son and the town Sheriff.

Accompanied by Jake, who is essentially a stranger, and a mysterious woman who came into town a few days before him (Olivia Wilde), Dolarhyde and the remaining townspeople set off to track down the aliens and rescue their friends and families.

The movie attempts to blend the Western genre with the Sci-Fi/Aliens genre, but it does so with a degree of awkwardness. The Western scenes do felt very 'Western', and the Sci-Fi scenes felt very 'Sci-Fi', and while they went side-by side without too much trouble, they didn't cross into each other believably. There were moments where it felt like the director inserted in Western movie tropes just to make the movie seem more 'Western', and the dialogue at the beginning of the movie was, honestly, not that great.

While this movie didn't really nail the Western look, it definitely had the Western theme. Jake is a quiet recluse (with a name like Lonergan, no less), running from his past, who winds in Absolution. Everything he goes through in the course of the movie is almost metaphoric of him fighting his inner-demons (and one of the things I really liked about the movie was that, despite the title, the word 'alien' was never used. The 1800's characters wouldn't know what aliens were, so instead, they refer to the beings as 'demons').

Which is one of the things that the Western genre has in common with the Sci-Fi/Alien genre. Over the course of the movie, the different groups of people have to move past their personal differences and come together to fight a greater foe. Underneath all the flashy special effects, the extended gun battle sequences and character exposition disguised as witty banter, both Cowboy movies and Alien movies are about people in a harsh, almost impossible situation, trying to do the right thing.

And look cool at the same time.

The theme never really feels thrust in your face (unless you noticed the name Dolarhyde, and realized the symbolism of the other names), so the film succeeds in being, for the most part, a fun action popcorn movie. I can't help but imagine Harrison Ford and Daniel Craig having an awesome time just shooting this.

Which leads me to my next negative point; it really seemed to me that the three main actors in this movie - Harrison Ford, Daniel Craig, and Olivia Wilde - were each just playing themselves. Harrison Ford's character at least had the benefit of being a bad guy for a while, but we all knew that wasn't going to last, because he's Harrison Ford. His character, Woodrow Dolarhyde, was essential a rich, old, tired, 19th century Han 'Indiana Jones' Solo.

I've only ever seen Olivia in the latest Tron movie, and the few episodes of House that I saw, but she's also very similar to both of those characters (though she finally does get some more development, which I wont spoil for you, to set her apart). When it comes to Daniel Craig, however, who I've seen in Casino Royale (and The Golden Compass, now that I look at his IMDb page), I thought his character Jake seemed exactly like the Wild West version of his James Bond; quiet, introverted, solemn, and more than a little moody. Certainly someone needs to play Lonerguygan, but does it always have to be Craig?

As for the movie itself, I liked it. It wasn't the best movie this year, or even this summer, but, honestly, who expected it to be? It tricked us a bit by trying to go for a more serious effect, but when it comes down to it, Cowboys and Aliens was really just a fun, adventurous action movie, a sort of inter-genre fanfic that we all secretly wanted Hollywood to make. It's worth seeing, I think, and I'd definitely like to rent it at least once when it comes out.

(On a side note, it wasn't until after seeing the movie that I realized it was based off of a graphic novel, which I'm now really interested in reading as well.)