Review of Cowboys & Aliens (2011) by Jake C — 24 Mar 2018

Just before the aliens first show up, a useless and forgettable character-of which there are many-who is in the middle of taking a dump, says something to the effect of "money makes you soft." On one level, this is a sly wink to the audience foreshadowing the principle motivation of the invader baddies: They, like colonizers and explorers before them, seek gold, a greed that will result in mass destruction.

But on a deeper, unconscious, and Symbolic level, the line speaks to the problem with the movie itself: So much moola has been flooded into this budget that the movie buckles beneath its own massive weight.

There are too many stars, too many plot lines, too many needless scenes, such that nothing carries much heft and the whole thing drags. Rather than a great accountant, what the movie needed was a solid editor, who would know that just because Sam Rockwell is a star doesn't mean he deserves so much screen time.

Similarly, Daniel Craig's man-with-no-(memory-of-his-own)-name: An archetypical trope undercut by the compulsion to inflate every character here with a (hastily sketched) backstory, baggage that slows down the film to little more than a crawl for long swaths, and clearly distracted the filmmakers to the point that major lapses and holes ruin the illusion.