Go on, say I'm underacting one more time, I double dare you
dir: Jon Favreau
It’s not even Cowboys VERSUS Aliens. It’s Cowboys AND Aliens, as if pitting them against each other in the title would be too aggressive and off-putting to audiences who just want to see them together on the screen at the same time, peacefully co-existing, standing nonchalantly side by side.
Well, they’ll still be disappointed, because the Aliens attack the Cowboys, so all hope of gentle understanding and interspecies acceptance fly right out the fucking window.
However, in the flick’s greatest conceit, rugged outlaws, cattle men, Mexicans and Apaches fight together to conquer the alien menace, which transcends the genre bounds of science fiction and enters into the realms of purest fantasy.
And there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s not an example of my natural contrariness when I say that I actually enjoyed this flick. Nor have I suffered a stroke, or a fruity outburst of dementia, nor was I on film-enhancing drugs whilst watching, or receiving passionate head for the duration.
More’s the pity. Still, I somewhat enjoyed this strange flick despite the lack of the aforementioned, or any tangible reason as to why.
It’s strange in that considering the jokey premise, a premise that’s a definite head-scratcher, along the lines of Pirate versus Ninja, or Samurai versus Penguin, or Man versus Hygiene, it’s not a jokey flick. It’s played straight down the line, with zero camp, and with a high degree of perhaps unnecessary seriousness. Every actor in it treats the story like it’s a credible, believable, relatable, worthy story.
What’s not strange is how it all plays out. Even though I can’t think of another flick I’ve seen with this premise and setup, there’s nothing here that’s overly new or shocking. The only real deal is that we would think or imagine that, for people of that time, predating as they would a time where the prevalence of sci-fi concepts that would make the existence of extraterrestrial species more comprehensible, they’d be even more bamboozled by these beasts than any other set of theoretical people.
I would have thought the idea and the appearance of these aliens would make these hardy frontier folk’s heads explode, showering their Stetsons, their spurs and their wholesome gingham bonnets and dresses with their own brains. But apparently they’re a bit more comfortable with mind shattering contradictions that we’d thought.
After all, they just call them demons. I guess as residents of the New World, where Manifest Destiny was a decent belief and viable civilisational pursuit, this kind of alien invasion and casual genocide might not have seemed so, what’s the word, oh yeah, alien.
A guy (Daniel Craig) wakes up in the middle of the prairie, confused, remembering nothing, with some kind of bracelet on his arm. Other than the funky bracelet, nothing too overly untoward happens in the first half hour of this flick to him or anyone else in order to tip the premise’s hand.
It’s played completely and utterly straight. No nods, no winks at the audience at all. The town of Absolution is the standard ye olde Western post-Gold Rush façade town we’ve come to demand and expect from countless western flicks. The town is populated entirely by types as well, but then again, no-one’s expecting actual characters in a western. Daniel Craig’s character may be an amnesiac, but what he really is, is a Grunting Man with No Name (yet) who can kill or kick the arses of all who oppose him. The town is run by a ruthless cattle baron Colonel Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford), who acts as if he’s been watching primer videos of John Wayne in his trailer between scenes in order to warm up.
Ford chews quietly through so much scenery that I’m worried about the state of his false teeth. The man turns 70 next year. Surely taking bites out of gun metal, mesa rock formations and alien hides must wear those crowns and bridgework down to nubs.
Maybe it’s not that extreme, but he does assay the role with deadly earnestness. I think he does great. Ford’s often accused of sleepwalking through flicks, and the more absurd the flick, the more likely he is to turn somnambulist. Despite the effects and the ludicrousness, he plays it like he’s Ethan Edwards in The Searchers, thereby earning at least a portion of the king’s ransom he was probably paid to appear.
And it also, seriously, allowed me to forgive him for taking part in that unforgivable Kingdom of the Crystal Skull abortion. I enjoyed seeing his delightful intensity that much, gravelly and curmudgeonly as he might be.
He starts off as something of a villain, as all the robber barons in Westerns do. His feckless fuck-up of a son (Paul Dano) acts the fool and thinks the law doesn’t apply to him when he shoots a federal marshal out of stupidity more than anything else. Dolarhyde as well doesn’t think the law should apply to his son when he’s arrested, which brings everyone into conflict with everyone else when Dolarhyde junior and Daniel Craig’s character are arrested at the same time.
The amnesiac with the bracelet is told that he’s a wanted criminal called Jake Lonergan, wanted for murder, and likely to dance a jig at the end of the hangman’s noose. After all this toing and froing ends once some aliens attack out of nowhere in their flying machines, snatching people with high-tech lassoes and blowing shit up willy-nilly.
Jake discovers that his sexy bracelet responds to violent threats by blowing the shit out of them, and he’s the only one equipped to do any aliens any damage.
Some of the townsfolk who’ve seen loved ones stolen, Dolarhyde’s men, a bunch of other people, an Apache tribe, some passing carnie folk, some gypsies, a swim suit model, and a plucky dog called Dog, embark upon a journey where they’re going to learn something about themselves, something about each other, and to kill some aliens, save their families, become men, become women, come back from the dead, resolve long-standing conflicts, and win the day, hopefully. Not in that order. Not with that emphasis.
To some, it might by ponderous. To some, it might be contrived. To some, the merging of two such disparate genres and sets of imagery is too, too much to bear.
And plenty of people, I suspect, will just think it’s all way too much bullshit.
I don’t have a problem with it. If adding sci-fi elements to a western setting is too much for people, then, well, it’s understandable. Jon Favreau, having whatever budget he wants from the obscene success of the Iron Man flicks, probably didn’t want to make an embarrassing flick, so he wanted straight performances from commanding leads.
I don’t know if he got them. Sure, there are dramatic elements aplenty, but I’m not sure how much they really add to our overall appreciation of the movie. Maybe a lot, maybe a little. They try to humanise the gruff lead by revealing a backstory whereby he was in love with a girl, and he was going to turn over a new leaf and such and say goodbye to his life of crime, but these were elements of cliché so cliché that people were sick of them before western movies ever started getting made.
What I did appreciate were the ironies of the whole setup. Pioneer / settler greed versus / against the native Americans is contrasted with the cold avarice of the alien invaders, who also are happy to displace, kidnap and murder people for gain. And, irony of ironies, they’re after gold, too?
I can’t really talk about the inclusion of a character called Ella, played by Olivia Wilde, because she’s somehow the least believable thing in a flick where Cowboys are fighting Aliens. Ultimately it doesn’t matter that much, because all that matters is that our heroes are heroic, the aliens are despicable, people don’t all learn to get along in between killing each other, and that it look good as it happens. Favreu has been using Matthew Libatique as his cinematographer for a while, a cinematographer whose work I’ve enjoyed seeing ever since Requiem for a Dream, and I very much enjoyed the look of the flick, absurd as it may be.
And I liked Daniel Craig in this. Every scene where he seemed to be casually sneaking in a smoke, where he levelled those piercing blue eyes at someone or something, or where he brought that Bond-like monomania he’s so good at to bear on his problems, I enjoyed. It’s not Shakespeare, it’s not even Marlowe, but neither is it the hokey debacle that the title implies. The lack of cheese made this immensely more palatable, and I enjoyed it as much as something like this can ever be enjoyed.
Enjoyed by someone whose brain perhaps wasn’t feeling that critical at the time.
7 times Sam Elliot specifically and bigger moustaches in general would have made this flick even better out of 10
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“Demons took your gold. When you get to Hell, you can ask for it back.” – sounds fair - Cowboys and Aliens
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