Big Screen Peter: Cowboys and Aliens

review by Peter Lewis

“Cowboys & Aliens” is the type of film that seems as if it can’t miss. It has it all. The can’t miss plot concept, serious A-listers leading the cast and a director that has recently emerged as a leading light in the action genre.

Of course my dad always said they don’t play games on paper. And there’s no truer cross-cultural metaphor for C&A. The circumstance just doesn’t quite live up to the billing.

Set in 1876, the movie pits a cast of rough-hewn settler types against the early probes of an alien onslaught. The disorientation and suspense kicks off smartly with a great opening sequence that sets up Daniel Craig as a cross between Jason Bourne and the Dollars Trilogy Man With No Name. Lacking memory but possessing a killer instinct, he soon finds himself joining up with a posse searching for the “demons” that have been absconding with the township’s citizens. As the story progresses, memories begin to accumulate for Craig as the mystery, as it were, is pieced together.

From this nifty concept the movie disintegrates into a jumbled mess of cliches, inanities and tiresome plot turns. This isn’t to any fault of the cast. Craig handles his role of lone-wolf quite well. And Harrison Ford, for his part, showed he still has a bit left in the tank, emanating a perfect mix of old man sentimentality with a growling determination as ranch kingpin, Woodrow Dolarhyde.

The stagecoach wheels fall off from there though. Olivia Wilde, as Ella Swenson, gives an admirable performance, but she’s forced to wade through one of the dumbest deus ex machina script tricks ever produced.

Similarly, though Craig and Ford are both great actors, they are subjected to innumerable errors in both story and scene. As an audience we’re left with lots of loud noises and a few tense moments of alien confrontation. It’s just the latest offering from Hollywood that dispenses with all credibility and instead relies on such mindless tactics.

One can’t help but feel rather ridiculous for decrying a lack of verisimilitude in such an overt exercise in fantasy, but there’s no way of getting around such idiocies.

The action sequences, pretty as they might be, lack any semblance of cohesion. Perhaps I forgot to carry a one or something, but the audience is shown countless cowboys cut down by aliens during the final pitch and yet, against all odds, the already smallish gang of good guys never seems to diminish. And somehow, despite being cut down on all sides by those damned, dirty aliens for minutes on end, the motley pack of ranch hands, redeemed robbers and Chiricahua Indians are able regroup for a heroic charge through craggy terrain? For a director so steeped in make believe (Iron Man/Elf), expecting this detachment from all logic is, well, damned logical.

One would have hoped that such an original genre mashup might provide a bit more pleasures. Unfortunately, it provides little more than a depressing moviegoing experience.

• Cowboys and Aliens is playing at the Carmike 14 and the Malco Cinema 12 in Fort Smith, and the Malco Van Buren Cinema. Link here for time and ticket info.

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