Cowboys & Aliens (2011)

Director: John Favreau
Cast: Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford, Olivia Wilde
Rating: *

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s a bunch of aliens come to fish for humans in the Wild West. And yes, gold. “They plan on buying something?” asks Woodrow Dollarhyde (Harrison Ford). It’s a valid question (one that is never convincingly answered), and one of the rare moments of logic in the film.Cowboys & Aliens is the sort of stuff that makes you appreciate good cinema. By pure contrast, that is.

Director Jon Favreau takes two really popular Hollywood genres—the Western and the sci-fi horror—and mashes them together in a random experiment. You half expect, hope rather, that this will be a satirical pastiche, one that will go after the clichés that both genres afford. I mean, come on, it’s called Cowboys & Aliensand set in a desert town called Salvation. Instead, it plays out in all seriousness as a gun-toting preacher, a rough-cut wealthy man and an outlaw, among other Western stock characters, find themselves attacked by slimy aliens in tacky spaceships.   

Jake Lonergan (Daniel Craig) is the outlaw with the tough-guy look, an alien bracelet and no memory. He shoots and punches more than he talks, swigs whisky and tells the sheriff he wants no trouble, only to beat up his posse right after, frankly because he can. I could imagine Robert Downey Jr (who was initially supposed to play Lonergan) as a better fit for a kooky character in a kooky script. Craig brings to it what he brings to the James Bond franchise—brawn, and a standard menacing expression. Harrison Ford, with a gun and a hat, looks like an older Indiana Jones, while Olivia Wilde is the woman from another planet who can walk out naked from a flame after being killed but has no superpower otherwise.

The slimy, ugly aliens that open up to reveal uglier tentacles look borrowed from James Cameron’s 1986 hit Aliens. Surely, with modern CGI and some imagination, they could have come up with something more original. The spaceships look like toys and the mother ship like something the Uruk-hai would have inhabited in Tolkien’s Middle Earth. Overall, the CGI, which is often the only high point of many a big-budget absurd extravaganzas, looks cheap. It might have worked a decade ago, but it takes more to impress us now.

With the visual spectacle found wanting, there is little that makes this worth watching. Of course, you can go just for the promise of a brighter 2D film. For once, things on screen look dorkier than you with those stupid glasses.

- Sarit Ray

31 Jul, 2011

 This review was originally written for gqindia.com (Click here to see...)