Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Cowboys and Aliens Review


For all who enjoyed Cameron's Avatar, this may fulfill your craving for a disappointing summer blockbuster with bad plot development. For the rest of us, take a trip to Dairy Queen. 

One goes to the theater wondering, "Does some team of screenwriters really have the audacity to take two classic genres, cowboy movies and sci-fi alien movies, and just squeeze them hard enough that they spastically commingle?" A movie titled "Cowboys and Aliens" makes you hope for one of two possibilities. It's either "tongue in cheek" clever, never taking itself too seriously like Independence Day, or so cleverly plotted that you leave the theater with your mouth agape.
Unfortunately, this is just what it advertises itself to be in the title, a (rather lame) alien invasion movie set needlessly in the late nineteenth century American west. Whoopee.

Now, if you remember Avatar, you know that just using cool effects and writing a movie with an interesting concept isn't enough. Anyone conscious during the first ten minutes of that film already guessed the balance of the plot and then spent the next two hours hoping it wouldn't come true. With C&A it's pretty much the same. 

The "first twenty" almost sucks you in. The movie opens with classic, gritty western confidence: The tough guy stranger (Daniel Craig)showing his chops as he blows away some bad dudes, then moseying into town to set the scene for his ultimate confrontation with evil. It's good, and the dialog well supports the premise. Yes, he sports some odd, high tech device on his left wrist, but that promises to lead to some intriguing twist. It doesn't. It turns out to be a reject from the last Ben Ten movie, or, more accurately, Buzz Lightyear's arm mounted death ray thingy. Hmmm...

And so it goes. The disappointments mount until you realize, yes, it really is about aliens coming to earth to mine for gold. (Just exactly why goes unexplained.) Yes, the dialog gets cheesier. Yes, all the characters find redemption. Yes, all the manufactured plot devices play their part. (I hate to tell you, the knife given by the mean old rancher to the young boy DOES come into play at the climax. Surprise!) Yes, the alien space ship comes complete with pointless mechanical gadgetry on its exterior providing the heroes a place to climb. Yes, the interior of the ship has all the large, ubiquitous air ducts for crawling through. The director even incorporated one of those classic shots where intense, blinding light from above overwhelms the camera while synthetic voiced "ooos" in the score chime in.  Oh, and the aliens are slimy, you know, with gooey, sticky stuff all over them.  (Why must all movie aliens be snot covered?)  It's pretty hackneyed.

I couldn't help but like Daniel Craig, though I wish this were another Bond film. Old Harrison Ford plays his standard curmudgeon character. Sadly, I found the little kid (always a sympathetic role) unlikable (but that's just me) and Olivia Wilde looks completely out of place. (Of course, -spoiler alert- she's actually a sympathetic alien from some other planet inexplicably trans-located to earth. (What?))

In summary: pretty lame.

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