Cowboys & Aliens – review
Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford contend with goo-dripping aliens in Jon Favreau's sadly humourless sci-fi western
In all the advertising for Jon Favreau's blockbuster Cowboys & Aliens,
the latter element of the provocative title is presented in larger
type, thus suggesting the current ascendancy of one genre over the
other. Among the dozen or so listed producers are a pair of directors – Steven Spielberg,
who has been behind a string of sci-fi movies, and Ron Howard, who has
made two ambitious westerns, one rather good, the other a distinct
failure.
Based (not surprisingly) on a graphic novel, the picture stars Daniel Craig, a stranger both to the west and to sci-fi, and Harrison Ford, who made his name in the Star Wars movies but came a cropper with his only big-screen western. They play a couple of gun-toting hardmen in post-civil war New Mexico territory, the stamping ground of Billy the Kid and Pat Garrett, who have somewhat alarmingly close encounters of the third kind with extraterrestrials. The western is self-evidently the host genre, but the movie might well have linked several familiar franchises by calling itself James Bond and Indiana Jones vs the Alien Predators.
The now moribund western has been an infinitely receptive genre, capable of turning The Iliad into a Texas range war and The Tempest into a tale of marooned outlaws, and of accommodating almost anything that's in the air, from ecology to juvenile delinquency. The veteran B-movie specialist William Beaudine (in his day, Hollywood's oldest working director) brought gothic horror to the horse opera in the form of Billy the Kid vs Dracula and Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter, both made in 1966, while the celebrated special-effects expert Ray Harryhausen worked on The Valley of Gwangi, in which cowboys accompanied Edwardian scientists on a search for prehistoric monsters in Mexico. More recently, in Grim Prairie Tales (1990), Brad Dourif and James Earl Jones played two wayfarers who, wary of being murdered by each other should they sleep, keep themselves awake all night at a campfire by telling hair-raising supernatural stories involving Native Americans and settlers.
Based (not surprisingly) on a graphic novel, the picture stars Daniel Craig, a stranger both to the west and to sci-fi, and Harrison Ford, who made his name in the Star Wars movies but came a cropper with his only big-screen western. They play a couple of gun-toting hardmen in post-civil war New Mexico territory, the stamping ground of Billy the Kid and Pat Garrett, who have somewhat alarmingly close encounters of the third kind with extraterrestrials. The western is self-evidently the host genre, but the movie might well have linked several familiar franchises by calling itself James Bond and Indiana Jones vs the Alien Predators.
The now moribund western has been an infinitely receptive genre, capable of turning The Iliad into a Texas range war and The Tempest into a tale of marooned outlaws, and of accommodating almost anything that's in the air, from ecology to juvenile delinquency. The veteran B-movie specialist William Beaudine (in his day, Hollywood's oldest working director) brought gothic horror to the horse opera in the form of Billy the Kid vs Dracula and Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter, both made in 1966, while the celebrated special-effects expert Ray Harryhausen worked on The Valley of Gwangi, in which cowboys accompanied Edwardian scientists on a search for prehistoric monsters in Mexico. More recently, in Grim Prairie Tales (1990), Brad Dourif and James Earl Jones played two wayfarers who, wary of being murdered by each other should they sleep, keep themselves awake all night at a campfire by telling hair-raising supernatural stories involving Native Americans and settlers.
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