Getting Harrison Ford out of bed to do a movie isn’t an easy task. You either have to be George Lucas/Steven Spielberg or he must owe you a favor. So when rumors were out that he was doing a cowboy movie, the industry was fairly intrigued in what he was signing up for. There was a large number of things that made Cowboys & Aliens look like a promising project: news released that he would costar with Daniel Craig, and Iron Man director Jon Favreau would be helming the project, and source material from a beloved graphic novel.
Jake Lonergan (Daniel Craig) wakes up in the middle of a desert with a wound on his side, mysterious piece of swag attached to his arm, and an inability to recollect anything that happened to him. When he finally makes his way back into town, he finds out that he’s a wanted criminal and is prepared to be shipped off to jail by the bad-ass Indian fighter warhero, Woodrow Dolarhyde. All of a sudden the town they’re in is attacked my mysterious flying spaceships that abduct some of the townsfolk. After all the rubble settles, the remaining settlers, including a mysteriously beautiful Ella Swenson (Olivia Wilde), accompany the two of them on a journey to recover their townsfolk as they travel the dangerous west where they encounter bandits, Indians, and more aliens.
You're both probably as badass off set as ya'll are in set
I haven’t read the graphic novel, so I don’t know how faithful it is to it’s source material, but unless I’m missing something from the bigger picture, you don’t need to know the universe to understand that these are simple folk encountering something they’ve never seen before. From there, the story cultivates a man vs. alien conflict as the humans’ 6 shooter revolvers and repeater rifles compare nothing to lasers and flying machines. The only advantage the humans have is the piece of swag on Jake’s arm that appears to be one of the alien’s technology. The story revolving around how Jake received the arm band as well as what happened to him is slowly unveiled as the story progresses as well as finding out why the aliens are there in the first place. The storytelling here is rather straightforward and bland with no real surprises or twists.
While the Daniel Craig/Harrison Ford combo are one of the more bad-ass pairs we’ve seen in a while, their supporting characters are relatively linear and one-sided. The supporting characters act as side plots and don’t contribute much to the story or the audience, and when they do, it’s rather cheesy and even predictable [I’m sure EVERYONE knew that the little boy would use the knife to save his life, the Indian would have a touching moment with Ford, and Sam Rockwell would save the day with a well placed shot]. Regardless, I still love spying Sam Rockwell in random movies. And then there’s Wilde’s ‘more than meets the eye’ character. As a ‘love interest’, she’s fairly poorly developed and I personally didn’t buy her purpose in the movie. “Why did she choose that form?” “How did she track them down?” “Where are the rest of her people?”. A slew of questions and plot holes that are either attributed to director Jon Favreu’s ignorance to key source material, ore maybe the source material itself is flawed.
Yes, you have a pretty face, but what purpose did you serve again?
As a time piece, it’s kinda convincing when you rule out the whole aliens part. The dialogue, accents, and clothing all compliment the era they’re living in as well as some deeper rooted conflicts like the Indian issue and the gold rush. These are mentioned and sprinkled throughout the movie and serve as a weak undertone to the true conflicts in the movie. However, something about this movie doesn’t match the caliber of the time piece similar to westerns like 3:10 to Yuma and True Grit. I can’t put my finger on it, or maybe it is the whole alien thing, but I can’t consider this to be a western such as the movie i stated above.
All in all, this film tries to fire on all cylinders to include an interesting era, story, leads, supporting players, and action sequences, but ultimately falls short on most of them. The leads and the action are there, but a lack of a more interesting story, a jumbled and unbelievable supporting cast, and poor execution in an attempt to make this a stylish movie make Cowboys & Aliens a rather unforgettable ride in the wild west.
2/5 Stars
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