Contributor: Andy Spencer
Written by Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci, Damon Lindelof, Mark Fergus, and Hawk Ostby
Directed by Jon Favreau
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As many seem to be saying, most critics just don’t seem to get this movie, do they? They say things like “the genres don’t mesh well enough”, and that “this could have been better as a straight western.” Well, kinda. The sci-fi and western aspects of the movie certainly could be meshed better, to be sure. But as it is, “Cowboys & Aliens” is a good, unique summer blockbuster.
The cast of the film is what you would expect: a handful of big-name actors, for star appeal right off the bat. On this front, Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford, and Olivia Wilde certainly deliver (though Wilde could have been a bit better). Ford is the standard grizzled, slightly racist war veteran. Craig is Clint Eastwood. And Wilde is…something else (and, at one point, naked).
Now, in the opening credits, you will spot five (!) credited screenwriters, two of whom worked on “Lost” with J.J. Abrams. However, despite there being a handful of witty lines and laugh-out-loud moments, the script could and should have been more refined, considering who would be doing that. The film seems to have tripped over a common hurdle faced by collaborative writing, which is that the script tends to become more inconsistent. This becomes more common the more writers there are, and considering the small army of screenwriters this project had on tap, it’s not terribly surprising. Consequently, this inconsistency extends to the actual story. I know that no one was expecting anything incredible (the movie is called “Cowboys & Aliens”, after all), but there are far too many disparate plot elements just thrown together. You’ll know what I mean when you see it. And my other small gripe is the alien design. Their ships are plenty cool, admittedly, but the creatures themselves could have used use a bit more work. They look like gorillas who have served under Davy Jones from “Pirates of the Caribbean”.
Favreau’s direction is quite good, smoothly managing both sci-fi action and Western drama. However, I will make the same gripe that many reviewers seem to agree with: this film really could have been a good western. The last real one in the genre was “True Grit”, which was quite good, if a bit bland, and in “Cowboys & Aliens”, the western parts are handled incredibly well, and are considerably more intriguing than the sci-fi segments. Craig and Ford could have made quite a duo onscreen. They still do, but one can’t help but think what this film could have been like with the omission of extraterrestrials.
Overall, though, this is an entertaining, flawed film that never takes itself too seriously, but fortunately, never lets itself off the rails, either. Not the ideal summer movie, but certainly the boldest.
Score: 7/10
