Film Friday: Cowboys & Aliens (2011)

When a film appears with a fantastic concept, a solid cast, and a great look. . . and then it bombs. . . you know something went very wrong along the way. That’s the case with Cowboys & Aliens. Only in this instance, everything went wrong. Put simply, no one associated with this project had any idea what to do with this concept.

** spoiler alert **

Directed by Jon Favreau, Cowboys & Aliens is the story of some people in the old West who battle aliens who are faster, stronger and can’t be killed by human weapons. . . except when they can. That’s all you need to know because everything else about this film fails. Let’s go through the list of failures:

● The Actors: The actors seemed lost in this. It’s like they didn’t realize they were in a Western. Daniel Craig plays the lead. He did an excellent job eliminating his English accent, he just didn’t know what to replace it with. So he ends up kind of mumbling English words that don’t really fit in any dialect and certainly don’t fit in the American West. Olivia Wilde, who plays the required female character, may not even have read the script for all she brought to her role. Harrison Ford wasn’t great either. He plays a bad guy with a heart of gold, only he was never able to find that line where we actually like him. The supporting actors never clicked either. It’s like no one explained to anyone who these people were before they began shooting.

● The Director: It’s often difficult to separate the writers and the director, but here it was easy. Few scenes made sense from a visual perspective, and it was almost impossible to care about what was happening on the screen.

The perfect example of this is the scene where the aliens first attack the town. The aliens have come to grab townsfolk, but there’s no reason to do this. Indeed, while we’re later told some vague garbage about the aliens studying the humans, there’s no evidence the aliens are doing that and there’s no reason they would need to. It would be like studying ants to learn their military weakness. Not to mention, the townsfolk are eventually found stored in some cave rather than being examined, which calls into question why they were taken at all. Moreover, when the aliens attack, they blow things up all over town for no reason whatsoever. They are more than capable of just flying overhead and grabbing people -- no one can stop them -- but they instead choose to blow up buildings for no apparent reason. In effect, the raid is pointless nonsense.

Further, while the aliens are blowing things up and taking people you don’t know, the camera follows the action almost randomly. Basically, you see people running back and forth until they get taken while the heroes shoot at the alien ships, and all of this is done in the dark by similarly-dressed characters that we don’t know. So throughout this scene, the audience has no idea what happened or who did what, nor does any of it matter. In effect, it’s ten minutes of pointless explosions with no substance. That’s on the director.

Even worse, this becomes the pattern for the film as things happen for no logical reason, as you are incapable of following which characters are doing what or why, and as nothing really interesting happens in any scene. “Stuff blows up” pretty much describes the whole film.

● The Writers: The writing is horrid. To explain this, let’s continue with the first raid by the aliens. I mentioned above that the raid was pointless, but that’s not entirely true. The raid was conducted for two obvious purposes: (1) so the hero, who was about to be killed by the townsfolk, could be saved and his importance to the rest of the story affirmed by those same townsfolk, and (2) so that the loved one of each main character could be taken by the aliens so they would all have a reason to begin the movie. That’s horrible writing when the only purpose to a major scene is to establish plot points. Not to mention that wipes out all the conflicts except one -- retrieve the loved ones. But that’s just the beginning of the problems with the writing.

The story begins with a mystery: who is Daniel Craig. Craig wakes up with an alien device on his arm and no memory. He makes his way to town, where everyone else seems to thinks he’s a criminal. The writer carries this mystery on for about an hour, way too long given that the mystery is neither the point to the film nor all that interesting. Indeed, once you learn that everyone wants him dead, solving the rest of the mystery becomes pretty pointless, but the story continues to act like it matters. Conversely, while the mystery is quickly solved, it simultaneously leaves too many details unsolved for too long. Consequently, the audience is repeatedly left in the dark for the first thirty minutes or so as characters talk knowingly about things we know nothing about and plot points happen which make little sense to us because we don’t understand the background.

The next problem is that after the aliens raid the town, about twenty minutes into the film, the rest of the film becomes a series of random and deeply clichéd scenes. It feels like the writer came up with a list of things which could happen in a western and just inserts those one after another. There’s also never a sense that the scenes really relate in any meaningful way.

The motives for the aliens are rather stupid too and show that the writer has no scientific background. The aliens apparently want gold because it’s valuable, even though the creation of gold would take less energy than bringing their spaceships to Earth in the first place. The aliens round up people to experiment on them to “test their weaknesses” even though we’re also told the aliens are so far advanced that they see humans as “insects.” And then we’re told the aliens plan to destroy the planet for no reason whatsoever except to jack up the significance of the attack on the aliens.

Finally, there is one huge problem which falls on the writers and the director equally: there isn’t a moment of this film which varies from expectations. That’s a cardinal sin in any film and especially in something as supposedly unique as this. To give you a sense of this problem, consider that there isn’t a single scene which doesn’t end the way you expect from the moment the scene first begins. You know who will save whom and how they will react. Moreover, you will have seen this moment coming from the moment the characters met because EVERYTHING in this film is telegraphed in the most ham-fisted way. When two characters dislike each other, you know right away they will save each other and become friends. A character who can’t shoot will of course make an impossible shot to save the day. When a character mentions a knife, not only can you be sure that it will save that character, but you will know at roughly what time in the film that will happen. And when that scene comes, you’ll know it because the director will point the camera at the knife to open the scene, then will show you where the events will take place, then the characters rush to that location so the alien chasing them can do something incredibly stupid and SURPRISE the knife saves the day!! Yeah, this film is like that. . . repeatedly.

Cowboys & Aliens began with a great concept, but no one involved with the film knew how to handle it. Indeed, there isn’t really a competent element of this film. The actors didn’t know how to treat their characters, the director couldn’t compose a single interesting scene, and the writers were just guessing about what a science-fiction Western would include. And that caused this excellent concept to be wasted.