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Movie Review: Of Course Cowboys and Aliens Is Dumb. But Did It Have To Be This Boring?

By Peter Simek |
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About midway through Cowboys and Aliens, cattle rancher baron Woodrow Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford) leans down and tells the young boy who has come along on their alien hunt a story about how he cut a man’s throat with the knife he is about to gift him. It is the kind of violent, virile, megalomaniac toughness that passes for no nonsense courage in pre-adolescent adventure stories. And it contains just about the only nugget of truth Cowboys and Aliens is able to contain: when you find yourself in a pickle, stab at your enemies vitals.

That Cowboys and Aliens spends little time worrying about anything but the run-and-chase is its virtue. This is a recycled action flick based on a graphic novel that tries to find its appeal by passing itself off as a cheap imitation of movies we have long loved. If Super 8 was this summer’s homage to the kind of sentimental San Fernando Valley Americana that defined a kind of sacrosanct style of movie making from the 1980s, Cowboys and Aliens is the flip side of that coin, reminiscent of the 1980s boy adventures that fueled a complacent post-suburban American Weltanschauung that reduces history to a black and white battle between good and evil.

Simplistic allegorical dichotomies are one thing – very excusable given the genre. But making a summer blockbuster that is dull, witless, and hardly inventive is another problem altogether. Cowboys and Aliens devotes itself squarely to its all out war between the scraggly townsfolk and Wild West outlaws and the aliens that have unexpected plopped down in the Arizona desert circa 1873. Yet its bumps and knocks are hardly starling and its extended shootouts are scarcely exhilarating. And when Harrison Ford whips around mid gunfight, his very Fedora-looking cowboy hat shading his familiar, if noticeably aged grimace, you wonder why you just didn’t break out that Indiana Jones box set and spend the night on the living room couch.

The movie’s best scene is its first. Daniel Craig’s Jake Lonergan wakes in the dirt in desolate backcountry. He is wearing a mysterious metal bracelet which he bangs with a rock but can’t get off. Then, a handful of rough-faced men ride up to him on horses. They try to take him captive, but, quick as a mountain lion, Jake leaps at one of the men, pulling him off his horse. Guns are plucked from holsters, and in a flash, Jake is surrounded by dead bodies, rummaging through pockets for gold coins.

If only the rest of the film showed such gumption. The movie hits a wall when Jake rides into the nearby town, which is lorded over by Ford’s cattle baron. His spoiled, whiny son, Percy (Paul Dano) leverages his father’s power to act out as an unhinged brat (Californian suburbia keeps seeping in). He is firing off his gun liberally and bullying the local bar keep when the unexpected happens – a handful of alien fighter jets swoop and lasso a few dozen of the townspeople. Suddenly everyone’s priorities change. Before they can get back to the business of maintaining civility in the West, the aliens must be dealt with.

This aliens-meet-Wild West scenario actually proves less preposterous than it sounds. Aliens are literary characterizations, products of our own anxieties over extended exploration of space or the advances of technology. In the 1950s, they were thinly veiled stand-ins for Russians. These days they mostly manifest our anxieties over technological power and possibility of the human race losing control of its own historical destiny. In the late 19th century, anxious men and women with over-active imaginations couldn’t dream up spaceship-flying aliens, but this movie realizes its bad guys with Jules Verne flair. There is a corny moment when Craig is snatched up by a ship and then wrestles free, remarking after the fall, “We were flying.” There’s a lot of ground to cover.

While certainly banking on its own camp appeal, Cowboys and Aliens ends up making a mockery of the idea of aliens by drawing our attention to our imagination’s reliance on contemporary technology to dream up extraterrestrial characters and gizmos. Seemingly taking this into account, throughout the movie, some characters refer to the aliens as demons. Yet demons with spaceships prove largely less frightful then the kinds that take up residence in your soul. Maybe there is a hopeful message here: the manifestations of our projected anxieties are actually becoming easier to deal with.

These are the places your mind wanders to during Cowboys and Aliens because it is so utterly boring to watch. After the aliens attack, Jake, an outlaw who has mysteriously lost his memory, makes his inevitable alliance with Dolarhyde (clever name for a rancher), and off they go. Along the way, so as not to lose the attention of the bubbling pubescent boys in the audience, the fetching Olivia Wilde joins the hunt as Ella Swenson, another mysterious character who turns out to be an alien herself. We discover this when she is tossed into a fire by Native Americans. Her body melts away and her ghostly spirit emerges from the flame like an apparition in Lord of the Rings. Moments later, she is back in her Maxim body just in time for the requisite PG-13 naked back and bottom shot. It is remarkable that all the gritty, whisky swilling outlaws contain themselves.

Feel free to take a little nap after that scene, which is less amusing for Wilde’s nakedness than it is for its own pure ridiculousness. You may want to wake up during the final shoot ‘em up scene, wherein Predator knock-offs attack and munch on many of the gunslingers (why do super intelligent beings from other planets always have such big teeth and so much drool?). But definitely try to stay asleep during the obnoxious scenes with the Native Americans, during which, through translated Navajo, we learn that Dolarhyde is an honorable man who loves a good battle. Come on, it’s Harrison Ford. Do you really need to tell us that?

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