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Friday, July 29, 2011

MOVIE REVIEW
Cowboys & Aliens
Adventures In The Wild Wild Extraterrestrial West


Harrison Ford as Woodrow Dolarhyde and Daniel Craig as Jake Lonergan in Jon Favreau's "Cowboys & Aliens".  Universal
  
by Omar P.L. Moore/PopcornReel.com        FOLLOW
Friday, July 29, 2011

"Cowboys & Aliens" is the second film this weekend to feature aliens on the attack, though Jon Favreau's western gets a little lost in its own procedure.  The film is set in Arizona in 1873, and Jake Lonergan (Daniel Craig) is The Man With No Memory.  He has a large metallic wristband on his left arm, something he can't remove.  Jake's wanted by the local sheriff, we learn, but when oversized Gollum-like aliens rapture the townsfolk away to their space ships in the sky Sheriff Taggart (Keith Carradine) and Woodrow Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford) have other priorities as they team up with Jake to find the vanishing citizenry and bring them back.

Mr. Favreau, who directed last year's disappointing "Iron Man 2", makes a film that's only slightly more entertaining in some respects, poking fun at westerns and making comments about the clichés and players on its landscape.  "Cowboys & Aliens" has its fair share of laughs, and engages in a patronizing revisionist take on cowboys and Native Americans.  The film tries to shoehorn "Close Encounters" and "Jurassic Park" atmospheres into a western whose rhythm is initially tranquil.  "Cowboys And Aliens" also tries to jump on board the Romero and Leone trains but for the most part it derails. 

Cinematographer Matthew Libatique ("Miracle At St. Anna", "Kobe Doin' Work", "Black Swan") crafts beautiful visions of the western plains, with Technicolor jolts evoking the richness of color in classic westerns like "The Searchers", which this film is largely reminiscent of.  Ella, played by Olivia Wilde, also reminded me of the young girl being searched for in John Ford's film, only Ella is out and about, mistaken too many times for a prostitute.  "Cowboys & Aliens" tentatively reveals her in some scenes while making her more apparent and exploitable in others.  The special effects surprisingly aren't as problematic in this film, which nervously combines the sci-fi and western genres, but after a while they're a tiresome presence. 

The film's script however, is its biggest casualty.  Written by five collaborators, almost always a sign of trouble (especially in action films and romantic comedies), "Cowboys & Aliens" is full of cardboard characters whom we care little for, even though some of the actors playing them are enjoyable.  Characters do inexplicable about faces.  Dolarhyde, a gruff, brusque character, suddenly develops a warmth for his creep of a son Percy (a hilarious Paul Dano), who deserves to be banished to another planet for some of his crazy antics.  Yes, it's all in service of trying to resolving the tenuous strands of a screenplay and fleshing out the arc of a character, but it's messy, hollow and unconvincing.

There's little purpose for why the aliens are shown doing what they do in "Cowboys & Aliens".  Why don't the aliens go back home to their beautiful midnight heavens and leave the Earthlings alone?  Are the aliens just plain bored stiff?  If you title your film "Cowboys & Aliens" you are duty-bound to showcase the relationship of one to the other and vice versa.  An audience can suspend disbelief, but it's difficult to put reality in a parking lot when the director and his writers frequently defy the realms of movie commonsense.

As such "Cowboys & Aliens" fails to adequately connect the aliens to their new landscape, so that you are watching two separate movies instead of one.  "Attack The Block" showed you aliens and smartly avoided detailing them.  Its mission -- getting intrusive aliens the heck out of Dodge, South London -- was clear, but here, aliens take humankind from Arizona, stay for a while in a state that will centuries later expel its immigrants with unconscionable laws -- and don't do much else.  It's a strange juxtaposition, which both the director and the script fail to enliven or make coherent.  "Rango" did far better on both a comedic and dramatic scale of combining species in a western genre.

Mr. Favreau, who sometimes lacks an appreciable depth in effectively utilizing concepts in the larger scale films he directs (such as the aforementioned "Iron Man 2"), spends much time here with repetitive phantasmagoric snapshots that feel like hammers designed to wake the audience, rather than key moments designed to advance plot.  While I admittedly enjoyed some of "Cowboys & Aliens" more than I expected to, in the end I was underwhelmed by an experience that crumbled faster than quicksand. 

With: Adam Beach, Noah Ringer, Clancy Brown, Ana de la Reguera, Chris Browning, Abigail Spencer.

"Cowboys & Aliens" is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association Of America for intense sequences of Western and sci-fi violence, some partial nudity and a brief crude reference.  The film's running time is one hour and 58 minutes.

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