Download Cowboys & Aliens

The Apun Ka Choice movie review of Cowboys & Aliens. When you saw the trailer of Cowboys & Aliens, you must have thought that it is going to be one cracker of a movie… I thought the same! After all, the story rides on such a unique concept - cowboys fighting it out with the aliens! But unfortunately, the movie fails to deliver!

The movie revolves around a man (Daniel Craig…we will reveal his character’s name later; you will understand why so) who wakes up with an injury in the middle of a Mexican desert, without any memory and a strange bracelet around his wrist! While trying to figure out things, he reaches the nearest town called Absolution. Somehow, he gets involved in a fight with the local rich man’s son, Percy (played by Paul Dano). He (Daniel Craig) is then arrested by the local sheriff, because, although he has lost his memory, he is the most wanted criminal of the town by the name of Jake Lonegran! (Now you know why we didn’t reveal his name earlier!)

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Then there is a mysterious girl Ella (played by Olivia Wilde), who helped the local sheriff in capturing Jake. The rich man’s son Percy is also arrested by the sheriff. Following which Percy’s father, the rich man, Colonel Dolarhyde (played by Harrison Ford) comes to the scene to teach the sheriff a lesson for arresting his son; and also take Jake’s case since Jake stole his (Dolarhyde’s) bullion. But the sudden arrival of space ships, followed by abduction of people from the town by the aliens, nullifies Dolarhyde’s plan.

What comes to their rescue is Jake’s bracelet, as he learns to use it as a weapon and destroys a spaceship (though the alien manages to flee). Slowly and steadily, Jake and Dolarhyde mend their differences and shake hands and decide to fight against the aliens and get back their abducted natives.

The problem here is not the concept of the movie, but the treatment given to the script. Jon Favreau’s direction fails to captivate the viewer’s attention for a long time span. Though the movie starts off well, with all the mystery surrounding Jake, the way the story unfolds doesn’t leave you much impressed. There are too many strange happenings in the film which somehow make the movie a tough one to grasp! Also, Jon Favreau takes too long to reveal the real identity of Jake. The reason for the aliens attacking the Mexican desert, also, does not leave you in a state of thrill (which it should have).

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SPOILER ALERT… Ella turning out to be a non-human is perhaps the only element of the script that leaves an impact upon you.

Speaking about the performances by the actors, our very own James Bond, Daniel Craig (as Jake Lonegran), gives us a great performance as the quickgun but stoic protagonist. Daniel’s show is perhaps the only saviour of this lifeless film. Though Harrison Ford (as Colonel Woodrow Dolarhyde) is the second lead, he does total justice to his character. Olivia Wilde (as Ella) looks stunningly beautiful but has little to offer to the script. Adam Beach (as one of the native Indians who help Jake retain his lost memory) impressed us with his performance.

The background score by Harry Gregson-Williams is an exciting one. After watching the trailer itself one realises that whatever be the case, the background score will not be disappointing.

Over all Cowboys & Aliens is a below par movie and a waste of a unique concept. The movie will not catch anyone’s attention: neither the cowboys’ nor the aliens’!And yet "Cowboys & Aliens," in which Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford take on creatures from another genre, turns out to be the unlikeliest good movie of the year. The component genre parts coexist, excitingly, without veering into camp or facetious desperation. Alien-invasion aficionados should be pleased. Western nostalgists may be pleasantly surprised. Fans of cowboys-versus-aliens movies, well, it's been a long wait and here's your movie.

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The 2006 Platinum Studios Comics graphic novel of the same name, created by Scott Mitchell Rosenberg and written by Fred Van Lente and Andrew Foley, has been stripped for parts and used as a mere outline for a newly hatched tale of a desperado, played by Craig, who wakes up one day in the New Mexico Territory desert (the year is 1875) with a strange metallic weapon locked to his forearm and no memory of a recent alien encounter. It all comes back to him in due course. Ford is the rapacious cattle baron who rules the dinky mining town of Absolution, but who has a heart somewhere in there underneath all that leathery guff.

He gets his chance to prove it when an uneasy alliance of hold-up artists, ranch hands and townsfolk (Sam Rockwell plays Doc, the saloonkeeper, and no one could play a saloonkeeper named Doc better) conspires to send the aliens — prospectors of a highly evolved sort — back to their alien land. First, though, Craig, the mysterious woman portrayed by Olivia Wilde (she of the piercing otherworldly gaze) and the Civil War veteran played by Ford must retrieve friends and loved ones abducted in the film's first big action sequence. You'll know by the end of this early scene, featuring crablike, 10-legged flying spacecraft equipped with a sophisticated form of lasso, if you're in or you're out.

Directed by Jon Favreau, "Cowboys & Aliens" is one of this year's many big-budget projects executive produced by Steven Spielberg. As in "Super 8" (also executive produced by Spielberg), Favreau's film freely samples much of Spielberg's own storied career, from "Close Encounters" on out. Favreau and his quintet of credited screenwriters also riff on half the Westerns ever made, notably "Shane" and "The Searchers," plus various less monumental efforts. The movie cannot quite support its attempts to take the milieu and the mythology as seriously as all that. Yet Favreau, a workmanlike but improving director when it comes to shaping complex matters of visual mayhem, has an ace in the hole, revealed in, among others, the first "Iron Man." He knows how to get audiences to take absurd conceits seriously without killing them with solemnity.

That said, the aliens here are damn frightening and certain moments involving an innocent, wide-eyed, "Shane"-bred boy and various near-death experiences recall "Alien," "Predator" and a few other movies too rough for 11- or 12-year-olds. The violence stays heavy, and fairly brutal, throughout, even when it's old-fashioned, non-alien Western violence. Graphic novel creator Rosenberg published the "Men in Black" comics back in the early 1990s; "Cowboys & Aliens" works with a somewhat heavier touch than, for example, Barry Sonnenfeld brought to the first "Men in Black" movie.