COWBOYS AND ALIENS : archive from 31st August 2011.

Saw 'COWBOYS and ALIENS' last night! Based on a lesser known comic book this film cost US$163M to make and bring to the big screen and in the final analysis made just a little more than that at US$175M despite the pedigree of its Director and lead cast. Here we have Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford; James Bond and Indiana Jones; the Old West and the Final Frontier battling it out in an 1873 Arizona setting where them pesky good for nothing aliens is holed up in dem dar mountains gettin' up to all sorts of no good! Time to assemble a posse, saddle up the horses and take care of business!

So I'm thinking - has this genre ever been done successfully on the big screen before and I'd be hard pressed to answer that question let alone say 'yes'! That said, John Favreau puts in a solid effort as Director eeking out a strong enough FX laden old west tale underpinned by a fistful of dollars to make the action and the storyline convincing and two 'A' listers to give it gravitas - but judging by the worldwide take, audiences stayed away!

This is a simple enough story of Jake Lonergan (Daniel Craig) who is on the run from the law and suffering a bad dose of memory loss. Waking up in the desert Lonergan is wearing a strange bracelet and has an odd looking wound and no recollection of how he acquired either. After dispensing with some low life drifters Lonergan heads for the nearest one-horse town of Absolution to have his wounds treated and to gain some R&R. He is noticed as a wanted man and subsequently a scuffle ensues with Sheriff John Taggart (Keith Carradine) resulting in him being knocked unconscious by a mystery woman Ella Swanson (Olivia Wilde). Being locked up with local drunk Percy Dolarhyde (Paul Dano) in no time Dolarhyde's father and local wealthy cattleman Colonel Woodrow Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford) arrive to have young Percy set free, and in the process so too Lonergan.

At this point there is an alien attack and all intergalactic hell breaks loose in the street, and which Lonergan's shiny new bracket falls off his wrist and becomes the weapon of choice to thwart them darn pesky aliens! During this conflagration an alien ship is downed and an injured alien makes an escape, hotly pursued by a posse of men wanting to know what just happened! Meanwhile Lonergan slinks away unseen into the night.

What follows are a series of alien attack set pieces and derring-do as humans and aliens are picked off on either side and often in gruesome bloody fashion. Throughout this Lonergan's memory starts to come back with images of stolen gold, double crossing his gang and perhaps where the aliens are holed up. The aliens it seems are mining gold resources and experimenting on humans to understand their weaknesses and in turn eradicate all human life on planet earth. The aliens are however, not indestructible and can be overcome with Lonergan's bright shiny bracelet thingy, a deftly thrown hunting knife, and a few fatally delivered gun shot wounds. And so it's on for young & old to move the alien varmints outta town and off the planet, and so the gathered posse heads for the hills to find the alien lair and kill or be killed.

Needless to say casualties ensue on either side but in the final analysis it's Humans 1/Aliens 0 and there is butt kicking and plenty of fun to be had as those aliens get their comeuppance. Surviving the onslaught Lonergan walks away free with Dolarhyde Senior and the Sheriff attempting to persuade him to stay and help rebuild the town. Declining the invitation but still a wanted man the Colonel and the Sheriff promise him that they will claim that he was killed in the alien attack, and so Lonergan rides off into the sunset . . . and all is good again, in the Wild West!

This is a good fun, entertaining sub-genre offering mashing up a Wild West yarn with some Sci-Fi hokey-pokey alien shenanigans and certainly worth the price of a ticket! Of course this is now out on DVD and BluRay and whilst it won't go down in history as genre defining, it's a little out of the box and still a little gritty, hard-nosed and rough edged to make it a worthwhile viewing in front of your own small screen at home.

-Steve, at Odeon Online-