Cowboys & Aliens (2011)
Directed by: Jon Favreau
Ah, the American West. Is there any richer, more fertile setting for creating myths? This is the super-compost of the movie world, the stem-cell material of cinema. Surely anything can be planted here and grown into something spectacular.
Into this lushness comes Cowboys & Aliens. A man (Daniel Craig) awakes in the desert, bootless, britchless, wounded and wearing a strange armband he cannot remove. The cowboy has no memory of who he is or how he got there, but he has a photograph of a woman. After despatching a group of scalpers who try to take him prisoner, he strips one of them of his clothes, and makes his way to the nearest settlement, a played-out gold mining town dominated by thuggish rancher Woodrow Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford). The cowboy gets into a fight with Dolarhyde Jr, an Uday Hussain-like character rendered less threatening by being called Percy.
Percy is arrested for shooting a deputy, and the cowboy joins him in jail when he is recognised by the sheriff as outlaw Jake Lonergan. Dolarhyde senior turns up with a bunch of heavies to free Percy and punish Jake – and then a small horde of spaceships appears over the town, blasting everything in sight and grabbing a bunch of townsfolk.
At this point, the character arcs can really get going. Aided by the mysterious Ella (Olivia Wilde), Jake becomes first the loner hero and then the leader of the rescue attempt, a role for which he is uniquely qualified because his armband turns out to be a thought-controlled laser weapon. Dolarhyde exchanges his sadistic persona for that of a concerned father and a leader of men. From Jake’s past comes a band of outlaws, and from the wilderness comes a small tribe of Indians (initially depicted as mindlessly violent – very postmodern – before settling into standard movie-Indian mode).
The action is reasonably exciting, and there’s just enough sense of peril to make you concerned about the outcome. Flashbacks from Jake’s conveniently restored memory fill in some of the missing details about what happened to him as well as revealing the location of the alien mothership, so that we can move quickly to the climactic scenes. Unlike so many recent sci-fi movies, the special effects don’t dominate – in fact, they seem a little unambitious, particularly in their depiction of the mothership’s interior.
Most of the time things happen fast and slickly enough to make you forget that the plot is utterly preposterous. The aliens, who look like a cross between the eponymous baddies from the Predator movies and some trolls from The Lord Of The Rings, have come here because they crave our gold. Ella turns out to be a lone survivor of another galactic civilisation destroyed by the aliens; she has travelled countless light-years to take revenge but has unnaccountably forgotten to bring a weapon of any sort.
In retrospect, this looks like a waste of acting and directorial talent, and the writers seem to have put more effort into packing in references to other movies than into constructing a new myth of the West. It’s watchable but eminently forgettable.
