Cowboys & Aliens [Review by Haus]

First things first: I just ate a pretty ridiculous hamburger. Big hot and messy with a toasted bun, onion strings, bacon, cheddar, and jalapenos, I think. A gooey, thick-fried conflagration of flavor. But this sandwich was more than just the sum of its parts: It was something Other. An entity. A force to be reckoned with. It didn’t pander or cut corners. Anyone ordering this burg met it square on, on its turf and on its terms.

You could love it, you could hate it. That burger, like the honey badger, just don’t care. It is what it is.

I don’t love Cowboys & Aliens, but like that burger, I do respect it. Its total dedication to its singular premise is commendable. There’s an honor there and, love it or leave it, we owe it something. A hard, squint-eyed respect. Respect that’s earned the hard way and against all odds. The type sparingly bestowed, through smoke, upon the worthiest foes in the toughest fights on the greyest, coldest battlefield mornings.

Shelving the bluster for the time being: It’s tricky to review this film without riding the Slip ‘n Slide head-first into the spoiler pool (okay, now shelving it), so I’ll keep my synopsis very brief. Fade in, Jon Favreau‘s wild west: Aliens attack some cowboys and kidnap some folks. Daniel Craig is an amnesic hardass, a sort of badlands Jason Bourne, a man of few words who awakes with a magic alien-killing bracelet and then skulks around acting tough and a little tortured. (This is all solid trailer material — no spoilers here. Also, Craig’s accent actually is not bad.) Harrison Ford, Sam Rockwell, Olivia Wilde, and a ragtag bunch join forces and head out in pursuit of the otherworldlies. It’s True Grit meets basically every alien invasion movie ever made.

Early trailers suggested this film might be a joke, or at least a tongue-in-cheek, so-bad-it’s-good, Snakes on a Plane-type camp-fest. It’s really not. It’s serious. It’s whole hog. It’s played straight. It’s cowboys and it’s aliens — more of the former than the latter, with the latter hewing closely to established alien invasion rubrics. (The aliens themselves fly insect-like, vaguely-steam-punk-looking aircraft and resemble the bug-eyed fruits of a Creature from the Black Lagoon / Cloverfield monster tryst. They’re fast, mean, unsympathetic, and as usual, they covet our resources.)

The movie is visually solid, carefully directed, and for the first little while stands on its own feet as a cowboy film. It falters a bit when it strays into sci-fi territory, but not terminally so.

So what is it? Well, it’s a Western film, with all the genre-specific paraphernalia that entails. And it’s also an alien film, but close-cropped and small in scope — to give the cowboys a shot in hell, you know. But over and over as I watched this film, one question kept coming to mind: Why?

(Yes, the movie is based on a 2010 graphic novel. But no, fanboys, that’s not sufficient explanation; that’s just dodging the question through stepwise regression. Why was this story told in any format? And why was it made into a big budget, big name film? Why, why, why?)

What I liked most about Cowboys & Aliens is that it never bothered to answer. It just is.

This film plays as if this is a long-established and unquestioned genre, as if it’s totally normal to mix these things together. Like my more-than-burger, it doesn’t pander, doesn’t cut corners, doesn’t pant like a puppy or seduce you coyly or hawk its premise up and down the storyline. It simply is what it is. It’s confident. Strange and proud. There’s something to be said for that.

It’s not a great alien film, though in fairness it doesn’t really try to be. It has various other issues: it’s taxed by some unusually questionable physics, as well as by aliens that seem at times very difficult to kill and at other times not difficult at all. The story tries for an Indian angle about halfway through, and would probably have done best to steer clear. Olivia Wilde’s character also goes strangely off the rails, and Craig’s bracelet is a bit too deus ex machina for my taste. But this film is so weird and so earnest that in the broad strokes none of these complaints much matter.

So that’s it. See this film. Not because you’ll love it, or even because you’ll like it. See it as a hedge. Because that way, if this strange, strange genre for some reason does take off, you can say you witnessed its birth — and that it emerged from the womb fully formed with sideburns, a six-shooter, and a dusty space bracelet, spit at your feet and said “What’re you looking at?”

HAUS VERDICT: Strange (and strangely serious) chimera that’s so unsmilingly high on its own supply that it’s actually worth a watch.  

See what the other half thinks: Parsi’s view.