'Cowboys & Aliens'—The Wild West Will Never Be The Same

Cowboys & Aliens, which opens today, is a playful, yet violent twist on the Western, complete with sweeping desert vistas, ample horsemanship and the classic Wild West motif—oh, and alien space craft. 

Smart casting and an amusing, yet utterly ridiculous mash-up of genres make for an entertaining watch despite some major holes and predictable scares. 

Director Jon Favreau (Elf, the Iron Man movies) goes for style over substance in this adaptation of a 2006 graphic novel of the same name. This sci-fi Western is easy on the science (and logic), so I reckon one best not expect too much from a movie that manages to get by with minimal expository banter, and maximum explosions and old-fashioned shootouts. 

Amidst a stark Southwestern landscape, Jake Lonergan (Daniel Craig) awakens to find that he can’t remember who he is or how he came to be shoeless in the desert sporting a gaudy metal shackle on his wrist that clearly does not belong in 1873. He finds little help in Absolution, the small struggling mining town nearby. In fact, Jake is thrown in jail on charges of murder and other crimes, none of which Jake can recall, and eventually loaded up for transport to Sante Fe along with the town bully, Percy (Paul Dano).

Enter Percy’s father, Woodrow Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford), the richest man in town. Dolarhyde is more interested in getting back the gold Jake doesn’t remember stealing than freeing his son.

As tensions mount, some interlopers of the Close Encounters kind arrive, but these out-of-towners have no desire for sing-song communication.

In the ensuing melee, townspeople are literally herded, roped and then absconded with into the sky by bug-like vessels equipped with powerful advanced weaponry that seem to rarely hit intended targets. Suddenly, that fancy bracelet comes in handy as it comes to life and blows stuff up.

Keen on using Jake and his new jewelry, enemies are banded together to track these otherworldly kidnappers with the help of Dolarhyde’s Native American servant/adopted son Nat (Adam Beach) and his stereotypical Native American skill set. The loner Lonergan (get it?) finds himself allied with a band of distraught townsfolk, including, barman Doc (Sam Rockwell), 10-year-old Emmett (Noah Ringer), Dolarhyde (who wants to kill Jake) and a plucky stray dog.

Of course, the fact that the merry band of misfit also includes mysterious hot chick Ella (Olivia Wilde) probably aids in Jake’s decision to play nice.

With bits grabbed from classic Westerns and high pressure sci-fi action, Favreau is obviously having fun leading this posse through the desert in search for aliens. Punches are landed with the sound of cracking bone, wounds are gruesome and the one-liners are precisely placed.

The casting could not be better, but the menacing insect-like, fish-eyed aliens are nothing more than greedy brutes—one-dimensional monsters that aren’t as scary as they are savage and unthinking. Sure, they’re really fast and are adept at killing and probing, as most aliens are, but their motivation is weak.

And when you have mini proton torpedoes coming out of your arms and knives for hands, do you really need to perform experiments on humans to figure out that those things generally do the job of killing them quite nicely?

Then again, Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford aren’t just any humans.  Jake even appears to be able to use alien technology much better than the aliens that created it.

Craig makes borrowed clothes from a dead man look just off the runway. Much like the grittier Westerns of the '60s and '70s, the good guys aren’t good all the way through. It’s clear that Jake is a killer, and much worse than that, he smokes. This hero wears a black hat and strikes first without a word.

Sam Rockwell is the only one wearing glasses, so by default he is the comic relief, but he turns predictable asides into unexpected farce.  Ford is in his element as a grumpy Civil War vet—a racist with a soft spot for orphans, not too far gone to recognize honor in others.

Wilde says “They’re here,” not once, but twice, and at both times, it’s pretty clear that somebody not there before is in fact here now. Apparently her job, on top of defeating a genocidal alien race, is to state the obvious. To be fair, Wilde, along with great surprises like Clancy Brown as the preacher and Dano, fully commits to the implausibility, making for a decent sell.

Sights and sounds of the Old West clash with alien technology and Native American mysticism (as depicted in the movies) in this out-of-this-world Western. The guts, gore and blood are prevalent, and much of the particularly graphic violence is seen through the eyes of young Emmett. Let’s not forget that manhood, testing and proving it through acts of justified violence, is the stalwart of most Western fare.

Absurd stunts (one involving a galloping horse and a flying space craft) and an imminent final battle are a bit over the top and take away from the intriguing set up, but Cowboys & Aliens redeems itself in the end. Considering the few films that have successfully mixed advanced technologies with the Western (Firefly/Serenity), this one is at the top of the list.

Cowboys & Aliens is now playing at:

• UA King Of Prussia Stadium 16 & IMAX, 300 Goddard Blvd., King of Prussia
• Regal Plymouth Meeting 10, 1011 W. Ridge Pike, Conshohocken
• Regal Marketplace at Oaks Stadium 24, 180 Mill Road, Oaks

For more of Megan Carr’s movie reviews and media musings, visit her website at therestiscreamcheese.com.

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