So far this summer has been a massive disappointment with regard to Hollywood output. This summer broke last summer’s record for most sequel and franchise movies. On top of that, the few movies that did not fall into these categories were not original ideas and were based on previously existing media. After the mediocrity of the summer I was really looking forward to the quirky western sci-fi mix-up that is Cowboys & Aliens. I did not leave the theater in a good mood…
This was a film that had everything going for it. Good actors, a well known director, story already written in the form of a comic book, good visuals, interesting premise, and yet it was embarrassing to sit there knowing I had paid to see this movie.
As far as casting they did a great job. Both James Bond and Han Solo in the same movie! Wow! How can you not want to see that team up! Well in theory that’s a good idea, but in practice everyone involved seemed to be anticipating this film being a blow to their careers and exhibited as little emotion and excitement in their performances as possible. Harrison Ford in particular seemed incredibly bored through the entire movie even when he is supposed to be near homicidal rage. I have heard varying opinions on Daniel Craig’s performance. He has almost as few lines as Arnold Schwarzenegger in his early movies due to his heavy accent and inability to speak English. Daniel Craig seemed to suffer the same problem as his American accent sounds ridiculous. I have heard his lack of lines was intentional to promote his “badass image”, but when most of his dialogue consists of “I don’t know.” (he has amnesia) he doesn’t come across as very threatening, just incredibly lucky that all his crazy cowboy antics don’t get him killed at any point in the movie. There are a host of other characters in the film and all of them are sadly two dimensional. The spoiled rich kid, the Nurturing preacher, the kindly sheriff, the bullied bartender, the crying child…do you see a pattern? Take a noun representing the character’s physical features then give them an adjective to define how they act, and voilà! you have a screenplay! I don’t know if this was a product of copying characters from the original comic (because not one of the original character names has survived as far as I can tell) but if it was, whoever was in charge of this project should have been sacked for thinking this would make a good movie.
By far my biggest complaint about the characters was how little they grew and developed, and my broader complain about Hollywood in general, how we are forced to sympathize with them. Let’s take a look at the characters. Daniel Craig’s character, Jake Lonergan, is revealed to be murdering, looting, pillaging, arsonist, gang leader with a huge bounty on his head. One might think that we are supposed to sympathize with him because he’s a completely different person now that he’s lost his memory. We’ll he’s not. He still goes around picking fights with every person he meets needlessly killing and causing massive bodily injury along the way almost killing his friends several times. Our hero everyone! But how about Harrison Ford? Colonel Woodrow Dolarhyde spoils his son rotten and protects him from the law so his son can go riding around and shoot up the town whenever he wants. When we first see Dolarhyde, he is torturing one of his hired hands over some cattle the aliens killed. Through the movie his past in the army is alluded to where he was a racist Indian butcher and feared by his men. Some of these stories are implied to be fiction he made up so that makes him a habitual liar too. This is indicative of a broader issue in Hollywood. In attempts to prevent the writing of Mary Sue like characters who have absolutely no flaws, it seems like Hollywood writers have started leaning towards the anti-hero turned hero strategy where the character is initially a horrible monster and in an attempt for redemption or some other change of heart they earn their hero status by the end of the story. This can be done incredibly well like in Angel, but character motivation must be clear and make sense.
The moral shifts in this movie make no sense at all. Throughout the film there is this theme of fatherhood surrounding Harrison Ford’s character. When he was in the army, after a battle the only survivor was an Indian child who he took into his home and gave a job. Nat Colorado, now grown and Dolarhyde’s son’s bodyguard is devoted to his boss and ends up dying protecting Dolarhyde in the search for his kidnapped son. This tragic story ends with Colorado saying he always wanted a father like Dolarhyde, who replies “I always wanted a son like you.” Wow! That’s kind of a blow since all this was to get his asshole son back. You might think that when he gets his son back Dolarhyde would realize that his poor parenting had ruined his son and would whip him into shape. But no, instead this seems to have the opposite effect and he spoils his son even more by making him a partner in the family business, effectively giving his son half the town. The son doesn’t seem to be a jerk anymore, but what kind of character development did he go through? He spends most of the movie in a coma. None of the character actions in this movie made any sense and if you paid attention it was very difficult to sympathize with any of them. We are just supposed to take it for granted that the humans are all good guys by the end even though it makes no sense for any of them to have changed at all.
This film has had an enormous marketing campaign that has been said to be even larger than Green Lantern’s and has been going full blast for a year now. One of the things that was pushed as hard as anything was that Cowboys & Aliens was from the same director as Iron Man, Jon Favreau. Now Iron Man is a masterpiece and it is still my favorite Marvel Studios movie. After this though I think it will be clear to everyone how incompetent Jon Favreau is at directing and that Iron Man was a fluke due to the input he let everyone else on the project put into their work. On his own, he is a failure, as we should have figured out from his filmography thus far. As far as cinematography it was amateurish. The movie starts with a very sloppy panning shot which astounded me. I have done very little camera work in my time but from what I have done I can recognize good and bad work and that was bad. The shaky-cam also got to me. This was one of the things I liked most of all about 300. When there was something impressive going on it would go into slow motion and give you enough space to see the action. This film had a lot of good action but the camera was often shaking so much it was near impossible to tell what was going on. Several times in the movie someone would get killed and then appear in the next scene. I only thought they had died because the camera was shaking so much it was impossible to even identify major characters in the action sequences.
The story was an embarrassment even to the recent summer movies. It was made up of nothing but clichés which could have been done with an air of comedy but was instead done completely straight which came across as childish for a movie of this scale. For a movie called Cowboys & Aliens you might think that the film makers would bring a little humor to the table with such a ridiculous concept, but you would be wrong. Not even witty one liners, which is in part due to Daniel Craig saying nothing at all. Every once and a while it seemed like someone was trying for a one liner as if the concept was described and then translated through 4 different languages before it reached the script writers. The “humor” was very poor and the audience seemed to be laughing only to fool themselves into thinking the movie was good enough for their money. The biggest laugh in the theater was a weak response from the audience when our heroes are riding out to chase the aliens and the token woman character asks if she can join them. The preacher says, “Sure, we have a kid and a dog why not a woman”…get it? I didn’t think so. And that was the funniest part of the movie based on the audience reaction.
Not to spoil anything but the motivation of the aliens is gold. That’s it. They are mining for gold. This raises a few worrisome parallels. What was the last film we saw with aliens and miners? That’s right, Avatar, and what was the most criticized aspect of that movie? The story. There is also a heavy native land theme with the Indian wars and then the aliens coming to wipe out the new white settlers. If Avatar was criticized for its overly done Dances with Wolves theme then I see no reason for Cowboys & Aliens not to bare the same shame. What I and my viewing companion found more disturbing was the eerie similarity to Battlefield Earth. There, aliens invaded Earth in the pursuit of gold and a vastly underdeveloped culture thrashed them and kicked them off the planet. Not good that your plot is readily compared to Battlefield Earth guys. There are also themes akin to The Treasure of the Sierra Madres in that old adage money is the root of all evil, or in this case, gold is the root of all evil. It seems that every character that pursues gold be it Lonergan, aliens, whoever, nothing good comes from it. I reject this reference on grounds that I don’t believe the film makers were competent enough to do this as an intentional reference.
There were a lot of moments in this film that didn’t work or seemed weirdly inappropriate. Maybe they were going for edgy and failing. Maybe my mind is just really twisted and makes connections that aren’t there. I would like to bring up that the aliens are defeated as the end of the movie by having their rocket blown up as they are lifting off, trying to get back to space. This movie came out within a week of the end of the Space Shuttle Program which had two midair liftoff explosions just like the one in the movie. Maybe it’s just the conspiracy theorist in me, but I think it might have been intentional.
I was intensely disappointed by this film which could have been really fun and instead is a stain on the good name of the sci-fi western genre. Thankfully there are enough good movies out there this won’t ruin the genre. I hope audiences realize how bad this is before they give too much money to the theaters, though based on the action I believe this movie will make up for its losses just on the low brow action market. This left a sour taste in my mouth. To make up for it, tune in next week for a good sci-fi western!
PS: This review is coming out a couple weeks after I wrote it, and I’m pleased to say that at the time of this publication, the box office take has been a complete bomb, I hope everyone involved learned their lesson and actually puts substance in their next movies.
Movies Referenced:
2011-Cowboys & Aliens
2009-Avatar
2008-Iron Man
2006-300
2000-Battlefield Earth
1999-Angel
1990-Dances with Wolves
1948-The Treasure of the Sierra Madres
