Cowboys and Aliens

A heart-wrenching tale of teamwork and redemption.

I spent $4 on this today. It was cool. Would have been worth all the explosions and dirt in the crannies of Daniel Craig's perfectly sculpted body on the big screen, but as a rental---$1 is all I should have given for what I got out.

Slow paced and heavy handed, it was a beautiful love fest between the middle-aged creative men in Hollywood. The only reason Martin Scorcese was not a part of this project was because he was busy jerking off in Atlantic City or Paris.

I love Jon Favreau, but when he gangs up with Spielberg, Ron Howard, Damon Lindelof, Roberto Orci, and a dozen actors worth way more than just their salt, it comes out looking far more like a fantasy pow wow and less like a great action flick.

Especially since it see-saws between There Will Be Blood and Predator so much. Take just the soundtrack, for example. Pretty innocuous, right? Strings, some drums, pretty run of the mill John Williams sort of stuff. It waxes to the very thickest amber gris in some of the weirdest, most forced romance scenes I've seen, after the first 15 minutes of Coen brothers-scale of drama-through-silence. What are we watching? Drama? Action?

Favreau seems to have thought he could do both. He could take the project as seriously as he had taken Iron Man lightly. Which turned out? Well, Iron Man. The idea of aliens and super heroes is still too out there for them to really garner the sort of gravity Favreau is forcing on the grizzled outlaws and their half-hearted attempts to work with Apaches to take out a bigger threat.

Isolate that romance. Let us see. Human man, ambiguously alien woman. Mortal man, ambiguously immortal woman who comes back to life in the middle of a fire. Off the bat we're looking at a form of bestiality. Beyond that it's against Craig's (he is referred to often by name, Lonergan, but if you can ever think of Daniel Craig as anything other than Daniel Craig you are a step ahead of me in losing yourself in fiction) whole tragic widower shtick.

This leads to loss of sympathy for the character, builds a little dislike against the savior of the movie, Olivia Wilde as an alien, and then she acts quite alien. Being one, of course, you hope she acts that way, but the truth is it comes off as plain awkward. We already don't like her because she's stepping on Dead Wife's toes, and then she has little to now human likeability. Except maybe the alien quality of (square jaw + crazy blue eyes = gorgeous).

At any rate. It's the best acting I've seen out of Harry Ford since Blade Runner. It's all in the voice, though, Smoothie may be right—he is getting old, maybe his voice is just like that now.