Big Screen Review: Cowboys & Aliens

Posted on August 18, 2011

The Pitch: Mild Mild West.

The Review: In the normal cycle of summer movies, it’s inevitable in the search for unique concepts that one genre may no longer be enough to satisfy audiences who’ve grown bored of superheroes and giant fighty robots. If you were looking for genres to splice together, near the top of your list would likely be sci-fi, a sure fire summer winner, and the Western, possibly the most distinct American genre and the most likely to appeal to the widest possible audience. So in the attempt to appeal to every possible demographic, mashing together the sci-fi and the Western genres should certainly have a pretty broad appeal. Want to guarantee your audience? Then how about picking one of the hottest directors of summer properties working at the moment, with two Iron Man films under his belt, and then pick two actions stars of the highest calibre to fill your two lead roles. How about Indiana Jones and James Bond? Huh? HUH?

The concept, the casting, the snappy title. There’s no way that this could fail. Which can only mean that complacency must be the reason why Cowboys &  Aliens is a tedium-fest of the first order. It’s difficult to know where to start with this, so let’s aim for somewhere around the hour mark. This is about the point when the first thing of any interest and excitement happens in the entire running time, and even then it’s over mercifully briefly. Before that, we’ve endured an hour of set-up, which could and should have gone one of two ways. If you’re going to have cowboys and aliens, you should either make lots of subtle (or not-so-subtle) references and in-jokes to those genres, or in bringing them together you should find something new and refreshing in one or both of them. The assumption here is that purely having Cowboys & Aliens together is such a wheeze, having them on screen together is enough. It’s not, by a long chalk.

You’ll struggle to find a blander Western than the one the aliens stumble into. Daniel Craig does brooding and steely about as well as anyone, but here he’s been robbed of his memory, so that’s all he gets to do, and other than occasionally beating people up in frustration there’s no investment in him, because even he’s got no idea why he’s beating them up. Harrison Ford is some way short of his best, which normally occurs when he’s allowed to imbue his role with his natural charm, but gruff landowner fatally stifles that charm for vast swathes of the running time. In terms of the other characters, most of them get one-note roles, from Olivia Wilde (token woman) to Sam Rockwell (can’t shoot straight) and it’s only Clancy Brown as the town preacher who seems to have any warmth or depth to him. It also seems that Paul Dano only makes westerns these days, which serves as an instant reminder of how much better the other ones he’s been in are.

It’s the same old story, in more ways than one. Six credited writers and not one of them manages to come up with anything approaching a coherent story; it’s just a sequence of events that happen to the same people, developments generally just happen rather than being earned by the actions of the characters and little of it makes a jot of sense. It gets a little more interesting in the second hour, when the cowboys’ normal screen partners start to turn up in numbers and when they help the cowboys to take the fight to the alien interlopers. But this could have been so much more; instead it’s a flaccid excuse of a film, limping out in a sea of summer movies with superheroes and giant fighty robots that all turned up with more plot, character and charm than this. A few Daniel Craig moments and a large scale, if odd, climax, aside, then this is just one more indication why such disparate genres just don’t mix.

Why see it at the cinema: It’s not short of scale and wide open spaces, it’s just short of pretty much everything else. But if lots of shots of the Old West are your thing, then you’ll not be disappointed.

The Score: 4/10