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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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