Review of Cowboys & Aliens (2011) by C H — 28 Mar 2013

Well I will say this there were cowboys and some aliens so the movie did deliver what it promised but I personally wasn't super impressed. Was the movie different? Did the actors do fine in it? Were the special effects OK? Yes they all were.

It all felt like a high grade B movie that the Mystery Science Theater guys will make fun of in the near future. It's not to say that it was bad but on that same note it wasn't exactly good either.

Daniel Craig more or less played cowboy James Bond (for the most part), while Harrison Ford kinda played into his cliched image in that fact that he was trying to "get back his family". So nothing really new from either of them, which was sad because at the beginning of the movie Ford seemed to come off like he was going to be a "I run this town so what I say goes" oppressive type of bad guy in the vein of L.

G. Murphy from Chisum/Young Guns which would have been really cool watching him play against type. But alas, they softened him up to an honorable type of hero. Sam Rockwell does a pretty good job (as always) playing the every-man doc/bartender character.

I still haven't figured out if I like Olivia Wilde though aside from her looks of course. I did like the smaller supporting roles of Paul Dano, Adam Beach, and Clancy Brown. So to sum it up (too late) the movie was just OK for me because it never tried straying from any standard western or sci-fi plot it all felt as if I'd seen it before except this time I'm watching 2 movies in one.

Blending the western and science fiction genre was done much better by Firefly. Bottom line: I probably won't buy this on blu-ray, maybe when its $5.