Review of Cowboys & Aliens (2011) by Christopher R — 08 Jul 2013

The first thirty minutes of this movie showed so much promise that I would love to see a straight Western with the same director and cast. Once the aliens show up the movie starts to go down hill and by the time it ends it is completely incoherent. The fact that five writers are credited with the story and screenplay and even more apparently worked on this film explains why it is such a mess. I always have a hard time reviewing these kinds of movies because they really proceed along the lines of a formula. If you had given me a week or two I probably could have taken this material and turned it into a much better script without much effort and I am not a professional screenwriter. Here is a rundown of the problems with this script:

1. The hero has amnesia for no reason whatsoever.

When the film opens Jake Lonergan, played by Daniel Craig, wakes up wounded with a strange metal band around his wrist. This would be a cool set up for a film Noir, something where the character development is more at the forefront. The reason you see this as a device in Noir films is because in those films the protagonist is supposed to be an "existential" character defined by his actions and not his past. That is why the premise to Memento worked so well, it was an old convention taken to an extreme. In an action adventure movie the protagonist needs to be somebody who can be easily defined by the audience and that they can relate to. In Raiders of the Lost Ark you learn exactly who Indiana Jones is and what he is about right away and this helps lead you through the plot. In Cowboys and Aliens you don't learn the lead characters back story until more than halfway through the film. They could have had a character like this, but he shouldn't have been the lead.

2. The aliens show up too fast.

Because this movie is such an ambitious mix of genres too much too soon makes it seem like a jumble of incompatible elements. Super 8 had this same problem. I would have been fine with the movie being a half hour longer if the first hour of the movie had been a slow build up in which the aliens and sci-fi elements are slowly introduced. The way it is now you are watching a Western for a half hour and the all of a sudden things start blowing up. We would have cared about the characters much more if we had more time to get to know them, especially since the character development that we did get was so well done and intriguing in those early scenes.

3. Surprises instead of suspense. No set ups or pay offs.

A lot of action movies these days are settling for surprises and not suspense. Hitchcock knew that it was much more fun to wait for a payoff than to see a payoff. Very few of today's directors seem to get that. Cowboys and Aliens has a bunch of surprises but no set ups. So basically it makes the movie seem chaotic and confusing. We have become savvy to those obvious set ups where a character learns something early in the film that they will coincidentally need for the climax. Really good directors still use these devices but at the same time subvert them. Hitchcock would set up a payoff but when he actually delivered it he would make the audience feel guilty about wanting the payoff. (like promising violence but then delivering it in a particularly gruesome and disturbing way.) Sometimes a director can set up a pay off and then pull the rug out from under the audience, either in a humorous way or simply a subversion of genre expectations. Steven Spielberg, Christopher Nolan, Guillermo Del Toro and Joss Whedon are all masters at this. A surprise without some kind of set up just seems random.

4. We have no idea what is with the aliens or Olvia Wilde's character.

We never really learn anything about the aliens. Some people have complained that we never learn what they want the gold for but that isn't really an issue for me. The gold is just the macguffin that sets the plot in motion. But we know so little about the aliens that we can't really root for our heroes because we don't know what the real conflict is or the stakes. We know they want to rescue their loved ones that have been captured but that isn't enough if their plan is just to fight the aliens blindly. Once again this goes back to the problem with the build up. If we spent the first hour slowly setting up the characters, the aliens and the conflict then the second hour could be nonstop action and the film would still work. (see John Woo's Hardboiled as an example. In fact, see it anyway.) If we don't know what is going on we have no rooting interest and that is essentially what is wrong with the whole second half of the movie.