Review of Cowboys & Aliens (2011) by Shiira — 30 Aug 2011

The Mayans disappeared. Not all of them, but the unaccounted for Mesoamerican people, who once populated 9th century Middle America, numbered in the millions. It's a mystery that, despite the best conjectures from leading archaeological experts, remains inconclusively solved, as to what exactly caused the sudden depletion in ranks of this culturally influential people.

Their disappearance, to this day, is the subject of much innuendo, mostly involving little green men from outer space. "Apocalypto", the 2006 ethnographic fever dream that wakes itself up on a rain-soaked beach, disappointingly turns its back on the long-held speculation over flying saucers, as the three men, sworn enemies from opposing tribes, stop their chasing, when their local conflict gets usurped by quasi-cosmic one, floating out in the ocean.

It's not UFOs, but Spanish voyaging ships, yet to the Mayans back on shore, the sea vessels carry the same impact as a fleet of interplanetary spacecrafts, and the white men encroaching upon the shoreline in rowboats, likewise, might as well be aliens, since this is their first contact with beings from outside the people's hermetically-sealed world.

Potentially, "Apocalypto" had the makings of a period piece science-fiction movie, but its fidelity to historically ethnographic accuracy inhibits the film's full pulp potential. However, due to the filmmaker's propensity for Grand Guignol spectacle, an alien invasion, in spite of the edifying presence of real locations and spoken indigenous languages , wouldn't be at all antithetical to the movie's form, because in actuality, "Apocalypto" is a genre picture(action-adventure), surprisingly lowbrow, dressed up in the academic clothing of a pre-civilized setting.

It should have been "Mayans & Aliens". Some 100 years ago, three Australian girls disappeared. Only one of them would return alive from the "Picnic at Hanging Rock". Irma remembers nothing, the same refrain you hear from alien abductees, Jake Lonergan included, who wakes up on the prairie like a high plains drifter with amnesia.

Whereas there is no ambiguity about an otherworldly presence in "Cowboys & Aliens"(whose mash-up of genres plays like a soundstage that the cast from "Blazing Saddles" forgot to crash), Peter Weir's 1975 film about the mysterious happenings at Mt.

Macedon on Valentine's Day at the turn of the 20th century, implies that aliens could be the cause of the tragedy that beset Appleyard College. Although the film is not widely recognized as science fiction, the narrative has enough proximate tropes to suggest "Schoolgirls & Aliens", made all the more odder by the same period pre-industrial setting as its unaware(and less subtle) successor, in regard to the disparate melding of the historical and the fantastical.

Back at the school, before the girls depart for the campgrounds, Miranda tells Sarah, "I won't be here much longer", which by itself, would seem to indicate that graduation time is fast-approaching, but at the picnic site, just before the girls take their leave, Mlle de Poitiers apperceives in the fair girl an otherness, clarifying to Miss McCraw how she knows that "Miranda is a Botticelli angel," or in other words, not terrestrial-based, which turns the plaintive admission among roommates back at the dormitory into a secret.

Miranda, in retrospect is telling Sarah that she's returning "home". For the holiday-themed picnic, the girls bring along a pink heart-shaped cake, which Miranda cuts violently with a large knife, straight down the middle on what is, in essence, a representational human organ, as if rehearsing for future medical experiments, aboard the spaceship hidden in, or above, the rock formations.

Like Ella(Olivia Wilde) in "Cowboys & Aliens", the prettiest girl turns out to be an extra-terrestrial. Emerging from a nap at the rock base, it's indeed Miranda who leads the other girls into a narrow passageway, except for Edith, who shouts, "When are we going home?" to her unhearing peers, gripped in a trance-like state, before she shrieks at something off-screen, which sends her running from the abduction site in an aerial shot that suggests the girls are flying above her.

This outcome was presaged. Earlier in the hike, Miranda advises Edith to "look not down at the ground, but up in the sky." For reasons unknown, Irma is sent back, but not without evidence of a possible alien probe; her corset is missing.

While Jake proved to be unsuccessful in saving his wife aboard the alien ship, Michael brings back Irma, using Hanging Rock, perhaps, as a portal. Now, better than the rest, she knows how the Aborigines felt when the Europeans colonized Australia, similar to the Absolution denizens, who probably would echo Edith's notion about being "the only living creatures in the whole world," in effect, dismissing the Indians outright.

Alas, both groups of white people too learn the Mayan lesson that "we're not alone".