Cowboys and Aliens

Jon Favreau started out as "one of us", a film geek who was playing in Hollywood's sandpit and proving that the fans could successfully run the asylum (EG. Iron Man, Zathura). But now it seems that he's losing that common touch as he makes more annd more films. Cowboys and Aliens seems like such a high concept winner on paper (especially with a cast co-led by Harrison Ford in a very welcome return to sci-fi/adventure territory), but all it really manages is the basics. Favreau makes a fun but ultimately soulless sci-fi tribute to the western.

Let's have a look at what they do get right. Well, the best thing about it is Ford playing such a crusty character. It's great to see him chewing up the scenary in a genre mash-up like this, he seems to be really enjoying himself again (for once). Film geeks often like to speculate on how roles might be better cast in hot projects, but this is one case where someone got it right the first time. This is purely film geek dream-casting, and the rest of the supporting roles are also filled with great actors - Paul Dano, Clancy Brown, Sam Rockwell, Adam Beach, etc. Unfortunately most of these guys end up feeling underwritten or underused. It's all stretched that litttle bit too thin.

I actually liked the way that the film wheels out nearly every western trope imaginable, though inevitably this just goes to show who this film is really aimed at: people who see westerns as just a bunch of cliches. In my mind a great western/sci-fi mash-up should be equally true to both genres, and if you're going to do the western justice then you need to respect it enough to move beyond the cliches and make a decent film in its own right. Here are the tropes I'm talking about:

• The powerful rancher who runs the town.
• Indians.
  
• Bandits.
• The sheriff who stands against the townspeople.
• A posse.
• The ineffectual barman with a Mexican wife.
• The town bully who's also a coward.
• The tough preacher.
• The man with no name (Daniel Craig literally plays a man who doesn't know his own name). This character is also a bit of an anti-hero with a dark past.
• The impressionable kid who idolises the hero.

I did like how the aliens (who are a bit like insectoid versions of the trolls from Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings) were pretty much the 1880s version of aliens... instead of having lasers they had high tech lassoes, and instead of representing our fear of terrorism or the cold war or whatever, they're basically just prospectors from space. It would've been interesting to see this idea developed a bit more, but at the end of the day this film feels like all it needs to do to get by is to just combine cowboys and aliens (like the title says). It should be a great film, but it isn't. It's a novelty and a gimmick and nothing more. There's too many characters and not enough depth given to any of them (including Harrison Ford's character), and it was overall a wasted opportunity.

DIRECTOR: Jon Favreau
WRITER/SOURCE: Screenplay by Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orcini, Damon Lindelof, Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby, with story input from Steve Oedekerk. Based on the graphic novel by Scott Mitchell Rosenberg.
KEY ACTORS: Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford, Sam Rockwell, Olivia Wilde, Paul Dano, Clancy Brown, Keith Carradine, Noah Ringer, Adam Beach, Abigail Spencer, Walter Goggins

RELATED TEXTS:
- The graphic novel Cowboys and Aliens by Scott Mitchell Rosenberg.

- Scott Mitchell Rosenberg also had a hand in the Men in Black films, and the post-apocalyptic TV series Jeremiah.
- Sci-fi Westerns: The Valley of Gwangi, Westworld, Back to the Future Part III and Wild Wild West.
- For western sci-fi (as in sci-fi films that ape westerns, as opposed to the other way round) see the TV show Firefly and the first Star Wars film.