A less than complex summer film that manages to be more than entertaining.
If you didn’t already know it, Steven Spielberg has a thing for aliens. Just take a quick look at his personal oeuvre and you’ll find Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., War of the Worlds and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. None of that, though, takes into account the projects he’s produced over the years. That’s where you’ll find the likes of Batteries Not Included, Men in Black (I and II), the Sci-Fi Channel miniseries Taken, Michael Bay’s Transformers trilogy, J.J. Abrams’ Super 8 and TNT’s Falling Skies.
What would be harder to guess, based on just a brief glance at his filmography, is how much he loves Westerns. Or, specifically, Westerns by John Ford. Or, even more specifically, John Ford’s The Searchers. But with Cowboys & Aliens, we finally have a Spielberg-produced product that combines his love for both extraterrestrials and Ford’s 1956 masterpiece.
If only he had directed it, too.
I don’t mean that as a slight against the movie’s real director, Jon Favreau. Though he may not have a distinctive visual style like Spielberg, Favreau is more than capable of turning out an entertaining, even riveting, summer picture, which Cowboys & Aliens is. A lot of the credit, too, would have to go to the passel of screenwriters who share credit (among them Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman and Damon Lindelof) and the creator of the comic book upon which the whole thing is based (Scott Mitchell Rosenberg).
No, the reason I say it’s a shame Spielberg wasn’t the director is because I believe he could have drawn out the extra nuances that are missing from the movie. Nuances that might’ve raised it from being merely an exciting popcorn movie (which, truthfully there’s nothing wrong with) to something that comes close to matching the moral complexity of The Searchers. Moreover, with Spielberg behind the camera, the entire Western landscape might’ve come alive, transforming into a character in its own right instead of just serving as a backdrop for the action.
As it is, Cowboys & Aliens has enough going for it to raise it above the noisiest of this season’s fare, the most notable feature being a strong performance by Harrison Ford. Ford plays Woodrow Dolarhyde, a no-nonsense cattle baron who’d sooner kill one of his ranch hands than believe that a mysterious lightning storm (aliens, of course) is responsible for killing some of his precious cattle. Dolarhyde could easily have been an over-the-top character, if it weren’t for Ford’s deadly serious delivery. He growls and barks his way through lines that run the gamut from touching to corny, but I was onboard the whole time. He’s the Ethan Edwards equivalent in this story, and like John Wayne’s character from The Searchers, he wears his racism and pride on his sleeve.
Daniel Craig, likewise, is a solid performer, though his character never develops as much as it needs to. Craig is Jake Lonergan—or at least that’s what everyone keeps telling him. He woke up in the desert, wounded and unsure of who he is, where he came from or why he has what appears to be an enormous manacle on his wrist. The mystery of who he is and what he’s done persists well into the movie and is largely what keeps us interested in him. But, like a lot of movies where mystery is what keeps the plates spinning, once we know all there is to know about Lonergan—well, the plates stop spinning. He ultimately has no other role than to be the hero: the man with nerves of steel and an alien weapon on his wrist.
Still, the story is inventive, and despite its cheesy title, it never goes for camp. It regards both its Western and sci-fi aspects with a steady eye and successfully navigates the canyon that divides them. Moreover, there’s an air of unease about the mise-en-scene that’s refreshing. Directors have largely traded tension for scares, but from the moment Favreau’s camera fades in on the blinding blue sky and dusty brown terrain, I could feel the spring tightening as the trap was set. And when the aliens finally do strike, appearing suddenly out of the night, it was hard not to lose myself in the chaos of explosions and the thunderous roar of their spacecrafts.
The action only becomes a problem in the last act, when everything that felt original and innovative about the story took a backseat to the type of generic battle royal we’ve become so used to. Not that I’m against climactic battle sequences, but this one felt like it belonged to another picture. Before, the action had been cloaked in mystery, but now that all the cards were on the table, there didn’t seem to be that much at stake.
This is a minor quibble that, I suspect, won’t bother a lot of moviegoers. Cowboys & Aliens is diverting in the best sense of the word. Could it have been better with Spielberg behind the camera? Absolutely. Is it, nonetheless, a rousing genre mash-up worth your time and money? You bet.
Andrew Welch lives in Texas and contributes entertainment features and reviews to RELEVANT.
