What happens when you mix the director of the first two Iron Man movies with the
writers from LOST and the ‘09 Star Trek film, and blend it all together with
producers Ron Howard and Steven Spielberg? You get Cowboys & Aliens, an uneven, bland
concoction that tries to mix the western with science fiction. It’s not a new idea.
The video landscape is littered with straight to DVD western/SF titles. Based on
the graphic novel by Scott Mitchell Rosenberg, C&A opens with an unknown man
(James Bond’s Daniel Craig) waking up in the middle of the desert.
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He’s got no boots, jacket, nor a hat. He also doesn’t know his name, or how he got there. But Craig’s character does have a weird metal manacle on his left wrist. He heads into the town of Absolution, New Mexico, where he gets an injury to his side patched up. When the local sheriff comes to arrest him in a saloon, he discovers that he’s an outlaw named Lonergan. But before he can be shipped off to be hanged in Santa Fe, Absolution comes under attack by a fleet of alien ships, which abduct a good number of the townsfolk. Longman’s weird bracelet comes to life and shoots down one of the ships.
But do they examine the ship by taking it apart? Oh no. They don’t do that
because these are cowboys! They are manly men among men! We need to see them doing
clichéd things like riding their horses, and leading a posse against the evil
demons (their name for the aliens) with a cute kid, a dog and a beautiful woman in
tow. The beautiful woman is a mysterious lass played by Olivia Wilde, who’s
starring in her second dopey SF flick in a row (at least Tron: Legacy was
far more pretty to look at). Harrison Ford co-stars as a ruthless cattleman, which is
a welcome change of pace for Ford--until the writers turn him into a witless sap.
The overall cast (which includes Clancy Brown and Sam Rockwell) is excellent; the
problem is the lame script, which has them all playing cardboard characters in a
contrived story that's filled with clichés from both SF and western genres. The final battle
scenes, where cowboys team up with an Apache tribe to fight off the aliens, should have
been exhilarating--but instead it just fell flat for me. It’s hard to root for
characters whom you have no personal investment for in a storyline that feels
overly contrived. If only the script was as strong as the cast, then Cowboys & Aliens
might have been a really fun ride, instead of being just another multi-million dollar
waste of time that Hollywood needlessly churns out.
--SF
