From the very first scene of Cowboys and Aliens, it’s made clear that this film isn’t going to
be a campy, cheesy play on a ridiculous concept like Snakes on a Plane. The story here is treated deadly seriously. We
open on Jake Lonergan (Daniel Craig) sitting, bewildered, in the middle of the
desert. He has a strange, technological device attached to his arm, which he
tries to bust off with a rock. Before he can accomplish anything there,
however, he is come upon by three looters on horses. It doesn’t take long
before Lonergan dispatches them and takes their clothes, a horse, their dog,
and some supplies. Without even having the main character say a word we’ve
established that he’s without memory, proactive about solving problems, and one
of the biggest badasses on the planet. All in about four minutes. If only the
rest of the film could have maintained that kind of focus.
The thing is, Cowboys
and Aliens works really well right up to the point where the aliens show up
and start blowing things up and abducting people. We get the classic Western
trope of a stranger coming to town with Lonergan arriving in the town of
Absolution. We get another tried and true Western story element of a frontier
town being ruled by an all-powerful, rich businessman. The town terror in this
case is an ex war hero turned cattle mogul named Woodrow Dolarhyde. He’s got a
remorseless, no-nonsense approach to dealing with people and a drunk, cowardly
son named Percy (Paul Dano) who takes advantage of his father’s clout. Between
the two of them, they keep the people of Absolution in a general state of
constant fear. Lonergan has a run-in with Percy early on, and the eventual
confrontation between him and Woodrow is built up really well. Surely, their battle
is going to be one for the ages. But then the aliens show up.
At first, I viewed the first half hour of this film as a
plus. The human characters were interesting and had their own engaging conflicts
apart from alien invasion; this could very well have just been a movie called Cowboys and it would have been fine. That
should have been a good thing that enriched the experience of watching these
people deal with alien invaders, but instead the second two acts take a series
of senseless turns and are composed by little other than generic action
sequences. By the time the end credits roll, the promising Western film of the
first half hour is nearly forgotten. Turns out the Aliens ended up spoiling the Cowboys.
The main positives of the movie are the characters of
Lonergan and Dolarhyde, and the performances by Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford
that bring them to life. Craig is awesome as an action hero. He projects both a
calm cool and a capable danger every second that he’s on screen. He very much
plays the coiled spring, and you’re always at the edge of your seat waiting for
him to go off. After watching this movie, I would kill to see Craig star in a
real, dirty, gritty Western movie by a great director. But I’d be willing to
take him in any sort of action role. He’s the sort of screen presence that
makes little kids leave the theater wanting to be him, and that’s pretty
essential when you want to craft an iconic hero. Ford growls his way through
the early portions of the film and seems like he’s going to be a pretty generic
villain, but over the course of the movie he softens and becomes sympathetic. The
change in the character is clunky and sudden as written, but Ford manages to
pull it off through sheer force of charisma. The way that Dolarhyde and
Lonergan develop and bond over the course of the film is its biggest triumph;
unfortunately it’s overshadowed by the senseless adventure they have to go on.
The supporting roles don’t work out so well. Olivia Wilde
shows up as a mysterious figure that seems to have some knowledge about who
Lonergan is and what happened to him before he woke up in the desert, but she
doesn’t end up doing anything other than playing a blank page. Her character,
ultimately, doesn’t add up to much more than an easy way for the plot to get
everyone to the climax, and the results are pretty embarrassing. And any
attempt to attach her as Craig’s love interest winds up being even more
embarrassing. If Wilde weren’t so stupidly beautiful her presence would be a
real blight on the film. Sam Rockwell is an actor that I always enjoy seeing,
and here he plays the saloon owner Doc. His character is pretty ill defined,
and I never really got what his purpose was. His wife gets abducted early on,
and he joins the posse in seeking out the alien base and getting her back; but
he doesn’t get a personal journey. Despite being a pacifist, he isn’t the
typical Western Yankee character, and he didn’t go through much of a personal
change other than learning to shoot a gun. Doc’s shallow journey and
conservative nature seemed to be a waste of an actor as dynamic as Rockwell.
Dano continues his usual pattern of overacting as Dolarhyde’s son. This guy is
constantly going way too far in trying to steal scenes from more powerful actors
than him, and the efforts are becoming tiresome to me. His showy but
ineffective approach to playing things big worked out in There Will Be Blood, where there was a Meta context for his
performance and it led to a cathartic end, but here he doesn’t manage to do
anything other than annoy. When standing next to Craig, who is able to project
emotion with little more than minute changes in a generally stone face, his
hammy playing to the back of the theater looks especially tacky.
More than the supporting actors though, it’s the alien plot
that sinks the film. They’re actually brought to life through cool creature and
tech design, but that’s where the appeal ends. The wandering journey that the
main characters go on to recover their abducted loved ones never makes sense as
a plan, and once the building tension of Lonergan vs. Dolarhyde is interrupted
by the alien attack, everyone’s motivations and choices start to fall apart
under scrutiny. It’s almost as if the movie suddenly started to be written by somebody
completely different *coughcough*.
And then, after we go through a senseless series of twists and turns that leads
to all of our at-odds characters banning together to take on the aliens, the
final battle is formless and poorly constructed. The numbers each side has is
never consistent. Where people are in relation to each other is never
consistent. We get a bunch of stupid Return
of the Jedi action where sticks and rocks nonsensically beat laser guns.
The logical series of events necessary to make a good battle is absent; all we
get is random scenes of explosions and violence. This is a problem with most
modern action films, but that doesn’t excuse it. Today’s action filmmakers all
need to be sat down and forced to watch The
Dirty Dozen to get an idea of how to construct an action climax that will
actually engage people.
Ultimately, the alien’s presence on Earth, their plans, and
their motivations never make any sense. Their appearance is never better
thought out than shoe horning them in because of the concept. We get some
nonsense about gold mining and studying human biology, but we’re never sold on
the idea. That would have been acceptable if their presence led to good battles,
or enriched the film with thematics, but it doesn’t. With a title that is
clearly a clever reference to the old standby game of “Cowboys and Indians”,
there was rich potential for some subtext exploring the character’s treatment
of an alien species with their treatment of an alien Native American culture;
but this film never even considers such an approach. Consequently, Cowboys and Aliens falls firmly in the
camp of summer movies that you have to “turn your brain off” to enjoy. Despite some
people’s opinion, that’s always code for me that a movie isn’t any good. Since Craig
and Ford managed to lift this one a slight step above bad, Favreau owes them a
steak dinner.
