Cowboys & Aliens

“Oh lordy.”

“What went wrong?”

“How did something that sounded like a brain-dead, but awesomely rollicking and supremely fun thrill-ride turn out so fucking boring?”

These were but a few of the thoughts that crossed my mind as Cowboys & Aliens lethargically played out before my eyes. Not a single happens in this film that could be described as shocking, surprising or interesting. It plays out exactly as one would think from the trailer and TV spots. It’s ripe with clichés about bitter old racists overcoming their ignorant beliefs, mysterious women being exactly the barrier of information and hope that the main character(s) needed, and a Man With No Name/Memory finding the key to his identity.

The Old West town in this film looks like something filmed on the Universal Studios back-lot, with location shooting done in the same places that John Ford/Wayne put on the cinematic map to much better effect forever ago. It tries desperately to adhere to genre conventions, but never truly gets the spirit or tone right. It is pure pastiche without any of the weight or simple poetry of the truly great westerns like High Noon.

This false note is echoed in each of the performances. The actors appear to be happy to tag along for this ride, but none of them deliver a true performance. Each of them appear too clean, too modern, too much like actor’s playing pretend in period get-up. The worst of which is Olivia Wilde who mostly stares with her wide-eyes and has a cringe-worthy accent that sounds like she’s straining to maintain it throughout.

The title does dip into false advertising for much of the time, with the film being primarily a western with the slightest taste of science-fiction for much of its running time until the last third. But the motivations for the aliens are as moronically underdeveloped as the rest of the characters and their situation. They’ve come to Earth to harvest gold. And for what purpose? Is it their monetary standard, or do they find it to be as arbitrarily valuable as we do? Your guess is as good as mine. And why are they kidnapping aliens? To perform experiments on the native species to determine its weaknesses, I didn’t know it would take an advanced alien race so many different specimens to figure out what our weaknesses. Perhaps this alien race has a market for human-torture porn.

The design of these alien creatures is both a retread of something that we’ve seen before and incredibly stupid. You see, they look like the upright cousin of the xenomorph from the Alien franchise. But they have one difference – their chests open up to reveal a smaller set of arms and their beating heart. In order to kill them, all you’d have to do is wait for them to open their chest, reach their second arms out, and stab at their beating heart. It’s a glaringly obvious weakness in their design/anatomy.

But this inattention to detail in just about every sector of the film should come as no surprise. No one went into Cowboys & Aliens expecting high-art or scenes of serious contemplation, but a pulpy good-time with inventive action scenes and thrills would have been nice. These two tones could have made sweet music, but the jarring shifts in tone are leaden and limp.