Cowboys and Aliens

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Plot:  Jake Lonergran (Daniel Craig) wakes up in a desert with a fancy bracelet welded to his wrist. Soon he beats up some guys, steals their stuff, and heads to town. In the town, he gets arrested, just when he is getting set away, rancher Woodrow Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford) comes to settle an old score with him. Immediately alien fighter jets strafe the town with missles, and fly back to abduct townspeople. Lonergran and Dolarhyde team up to track the aliens down and get their family members back. Pistol-packing Ella Swenson rides along, but soon we see she has a backstory with the aliens. The cowboys recruit a whole posse including crooks and Native Americans to ride on the alien camp.

Review: Cowboys movies are a stereotype genre, and these cowboys play the stylized tough guys and stoic heros from a thousand old movies. Newer action movies have show more realistic emotions, but Lonergran and Dolarhyde are retro cowboys. The aliens are really just monsters -- we could have had the same plot with dinosaurs or King Kong.

The stoic heros make the movie drier than I like, but it is truer to the style of the genre. Truth is that I don't like cowboy movies. More chemistry between the characters would have made the end scenes better too. I am a Sci-Fi fan, so I would have liked aliens that we could talk to, not just ugly killing machines.

I thought Daniel Craig made a great cowboy -- he definitely has the look, and he does a great silent stoic cowboy. We see some of Harrison Ford's great facial acting, but most of the time he is being a hard-ass. Olivia Wilde has a fun role where she is not what she seems, and is more modern than the other characters.

The movie could have used more fun. It was always trying to build dark tension, and the characters seldom smiled, and were too serious to joke.

Cast: Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford, Olivia Wilde.

Directed by: John Favreau

Rating:   2.5 stars: more interesting than fun. Less than the sum of the parts. Perhaps it should be 2 stars.

More: I would have liked to see the Cowboys react with a little more irrational fear when the alien fighter planes fly over the first time. When the person walks out of the fire, someone should have thought it was an angel/ghost/devil. The movie would have been more fun with some lightness like that.

Even More:  Are the aliens are an allegory for the immigration of Mexicans into the US?  No, this is just a Monster movie with cowboys.


Yet More: I had to roll my eyes when I saw that the main character's name is spelled "Lonergan," which looks so much like "Lone Ranger." "Dolarhyde" is not subtle either.

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