Cowboys And Aliens (2011)
Cowboys And Aliens
★★★☆☆
Directed by: Jon Favreau
Written by: Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, Damon Lindelof, Mark Fergus, Steve Oedekerk and Hawk Ostby
Based on the Graphic Novel by: Scott Mitchell Rosenberg
I like the premise of Cowboys And Aliens: Take a fairly stock alien invasion story and set it in an unexpected historical timeframe and watch the sparks fly. Of course, the movie isn’t as straightforward as that, and it seems to suffer badly from too many writers syndrome. Included in the fairly simple, promising premise is an amnesic hero, a mystery woman who can handle herself, a grizzled war veteran with a grudge against the hero, an unlikely buddy-cop formula, a young boy in a coming of age tale, several different rescue-the-beloved-family-member subplots, a proxy-son/proxy-father dynamic coupled with a real-son-who-is-a-disappointment and a burgeoning love story. If it sounds like a ridiculously over-complicated plot, it is, unequivocally.
It’s not that Cowboys And Aliens is bad, it’s just that with so many secondary characters and overlapping plot lines, the movie spends an insane amount of the two full hour running time dealing with backstories and relationship hassles and standoffs and squabbles that the titular aliens only seem to ever show up when the writers didn’t want to have to sort any of it out for real. As such, the aliens become sort of a plot macguffin, conveniently timing their attack at market-research-driven intervals when the audience starts to get bored realizing that there isn’t all that much mystery to Jake Lonergan (played with full-on damaged hero solemnity by Daniel Craig) and there’s not that much interesting about Colonel Dolarhyde (played with gruff, Air Force One stateliness by Harrison Ford). As in Tron Legacy, the standout is the surprisingly watchable Ella Swenson (played close to the vest by a confident Olivia Wilde) and Sam Rockwell makes the best of a necessarily under-developed Doc in his few real scenes, but by the time we learn the truth about Lonergan and find out the secrets Ella is hiding, the movie has started to wear out its welcome and I found myself slipping into impatient summer blockbuster watcher mode, hoping for something to explode again so I could stop pretending to truly care about it.
In the visceral, violent, special effects department, Cowboys And Aliens delivers eventually, but it’s only in aggregate until the final confrontation. The real problem is that Cowboys And Aliens misses the mark on two key points that it could have focused on to much better effect. One is that the film takes itself too seriously. I realize that with a semi-campy premise the risk of becoming a big, stupid action movie like Men In Black is high, but Cowboys And Aliens is far too somber for its own good. It’s hard to have fun watching a movie that isn’t itself a lot of fun. The other is suspense, which the film comes close to generating a couple of times but mostly sidesteps in favor of ever more inclusions from the vast database over at TV Tropes.
In the end, Cowboys And Aliens was okay. It wasn’t great, it was definitely overwrought and missed the mark a bit, but it has potential as a franchise and a follow up with less talking heads and more Shootout At The OK Corona would be something I’d love to watch.