“Cowboys & Aliens” (Two and a Half Stars)
U.S.: Jon Favreau, 2011
Movie Westerns usually take place in a primitive land of the American past (somewhere in the 19th century) full of horses and trains and showdowns and an occasional cattle drive, where the men spend an inordinate amount of time in saloons, and sudden death lurks behind every mesa and second story hotel window. Science Fiction, on the other hand usually transpires in a dazzling or bleak futuristic world of super technology and space travel, or (more pertinent here) of alien invasions of Earth, by impregnable looking monsters or robots who are so huge and dangerous that they laugh (or seem to) at our puny guns and bombs, and would giggle at the sight of a six-shooter at High Noon.
So what do these two movie genres have in common, enough to get them smooshed together by producers Ron Howard, Brian Grazer and (exec) Steven Spielberg and director Jon Favreau, with stars Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford and others in the peculiar, sometimes exciting, sometimes silly but often enough, watchable Cowboys & Aliens?
Quite a lot, as a matter of fact. In fact, in the early pre-1920s-’30s days of magazine science fiction, when the magazines had titles like Astounding and Amazing, many sci-fi stories were ridiculed as “space operas” — a play on “horse operas,“ slang for cheap pulp Westerns. They were damned for what was considered recycled clichéd westerns plots simply transplanted to a clichéd sci-fi backdrop.
That isn’t exactly what Cowboys & Aliens is. In fact, it’s a fragmentary science fiction plot — in the alien invasion mode — translated onto a western backdrop, with a lot of typical Western characters. The thing of it is: In this movie, the Western parts mostly work and the science fiction parts mostly don’t. If you cut out all the science fiction scenes from Cowboys & Aliens and switched the ending around to keep some more conventional villains in play, you’d have a better movie. What you have here instead, is a ridiculous notion that becomes a ridiculous movie, one which wastes a good cast and some fine Matthew Libatique cinematography, by trying to shove Alien into The Searchers and then down our throats — ending up with a show that’s good where it should be amusingly bad, and bad whenever it tries to save the good (Western) scenes with flashy sci-fi stuff.
The filmmakers should have trusted their instincts as obvious Leone and Ford (and maybe Peckinpah and Mann and Hawks and Boetticher) admirers. The people involved in C&A definitely know what they’re doing. They know both the classic Westerns and classic science fiction, and they obviously like both genres at their best. They should have realized that the whole idea is ridiculous, and a lot of the movie is as well.
The source for Cowboys & Aliens is a graphic novel by Scott Mitchell Rosenberg, about extraterrestrials invading the West. In the movie, it’s 1873, and they’re looking for gold, and occasionally killing some people who get on their way. Anyay, it’s a comic I haven’t read and that was apparently largely jettisoned anyway.
Favreau and the producers and writers (seven of them, always a bad sign) turn what’s left of Rosenberg’s novel into a major movie with mega-stars (Craig and Ford) and mega-effects (space ships attack an Old West town).
The movie starts out well, in a pseudo-Sergio Leone, pseudo-John Ford vein. Just as in Eastwood’s specialty for Leone, we get some tense, stylized scenes of Craig as the lone gunslinger, Jake Lonergan, who’s suffering from amnesia, sporting a weird wrist shackle and who dispatched three baddies with little effort and then wanders into the town of Absolution, and getting mixed up in a standoff between the local cattle baron Woodrow Dolarhyde (Ford) and the upright sheriff John Taggart (Keith Carradine) over the ranch king’s worthless son Percy (Paul Dano) — before the aliens in their space-whatevers swoop in like Hitchcock’s Birds, wreak their havoc and then fly off with Percy and others.
Favreau and the producers and writers (seven of them, always a bad sign) turn what’s left of Rosenberg’s novel into a major movie with mega-stars (Craig and Ford) and mega-effects (space ships attack an Old West town).
The movie starts out well, in a pseudo-Sergio Leone, pseudo-John Ford vein. Just as in Eastwood’s specialty for Leone, we get some tense, stylized scenes of Craig as the lone gunslinger, Jake Lonergan, who’s suffering from amnesia, sporting a weird wrist shackle and who dispatched three baddies with little effort and then wanders into the town of Absolution, and getting mixed up in a standoff between the local cattle baron Woodrow Dolarhyde (Ford) and the upright sheriff John Taggart (Keith Carradine) over the ranch king’s worthless son Percy (Paul Dano) — before the aliens in their space-whatevers swoop in like Hitchcock’s Birds, wreak their havoc and then fly off with Percy and others.
Some critics have praised that scene, and some audiences must like it. But I thought it was ridiculous, and it turned the whole movie into something ridiculous as well. For me, almost every scene without the space aliens worked well, at least passably and sometimes smashingly — and almost every scene with the space invaders was out to lunch and something I’d rather not have seen, or even thought about seeing.
As in Iron Man 2, Favreau seems to be trying to make another movie that hits the bell and uses all the elements like Iron Man, and if he wasn’t saddled with those aliens, he might have made it. But extrapolate for a while. Imagine Stagecoach, with flying saucers swooping down during the chase on the Salt Flats and pulling up all the passengers, including Tommy Mitchell and Duke Wayne, into the sky. Imagine Once Upon a Time in the West with the railroad workers constructing a space missile instead of train tracks, and, at the end, Charley Bronson taking off for Mars. Imagine The Wild Bunch with Holden, Borgnine, Johnson and Oates heading toward a showdown against twenty robots (with Mexican accents), a Godzilla and a huge ray gun. Imagine The Searchers ending in a huge battle not between the Comanches and the Cavalry, but between cowboys, Indians, a cattle baron and his gang, and the man with no name (or Lonergan) all riding against huge smelly aliens from outer space on flying machines.
SPOILER ALERT
Oh, I forgot. You’ll see that last one, if you go to Cowboys & Aliens.
END OF SPOILER
Oh, I forgot. You’ll see that last one, if you go to Cowboys & Aliens.
END OF SPOILER
If you ditched all the sci-fi, and it should be ditched, there’s enough left in Cowboys and Aliens to make a superior old-style Western and draw an intelligent audience that likes classically-constructed movies and good casts. Harrison Ford’s Dolarhyde is a fine, grizzled old villain, and he should have stayed a villain. Craig is good at the Clint stuff, and the rest of the movie’s bunch includes, commendably, Olivia Wilde as a sort-of-semi-Swedish love interest named Ella Swenson, Sam Rockwell is the likeably vulnerable bartender Doc, Clancy Brown doing a Sam Elliott as shaggy Reverend Meacham, Adam Beach as Percy‘s Native American pal Nat Colorado, Raoul Trujillo as prickly warrior Black Knife, and, seemingly borrowing a page from Walter Hill‘s The Long Riders, the talented Taylors (Buck, Matthew and Cooper) playing the nefarious Claibornes (Wes, Luke and Mose).
There’s also a wonderful, eerie scene with an overturned riverboat, in the middle of the desert — an oddity that’s never explained and that’s much scarier than any scene with the aliens.
It shouldn’t be surprising though that Cowboys & Aliens seems so absurd a mixture. Offhand, I can only think of two previous attempts to make science fiction Westerns (though Michael Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans sometimes looks like science fiction). And that’s the 1935 Gene Autry serial The Phantom Empire, and the 1966 Z-movie, Jesse James Meets Frankenstein‘s Daughter, starring John Lupton. Both those pictures rank high among the most foolish movies ever made — even though Phantom Empire is at least entertainingly foolish. “J.J. Meets F.D.” is just trashily foolish, and Cowboys & Aliens, by comparison is high-budget, super-slick foolishness.
Look, I’m all for reviving movie Westerns, and I‘m happy that these filmmakers want to try to pull a Western, or at least a semi-Western, back up into the big leagues. (True Grit and 3:10 to Yuma both grossed a ton and True Grit was a damned good Western, and if anyone really complains about demographics, which means the movies draw older audiences, Well, I think it’s stupid to complain about any kind of audience. It’s also ageist, which is really no better than being racist, sexist or classist — just a bigotry more frequently indulged.
Anyway: Cowboys & Aliens. Give me a break. Demographics be damned. A good Western will eventually draw big, and it doesn’t damn well need monsters. All it needs is the right audience.
