The makers of this film didn’t want you to get confused about what it’s about so they gave it the obvious title “Cowboys & Aliens,†but if they really wanted to do us a favour they should have called it “Cowboys & Aliens & 2 hours of your life that you’ll never get back.†When I first heard the premise of this film, I was of the opinion that it was too ridiculous to work and director Jon Favreau has seen to it that I was proved right.
The film starts up as a straight western with the Jake Lonergan (Daniel Craig) who wakes up in a 1873 Arizona wilderness wounded, with amnesia and a strange metal bracelet on his arm. He makes his way to a town called Absolution where he quickly finds out that he is a wanted man. While there he also meets a mysterious woman named Ella Swenson (Olivia Wilde) among some other townsfolk before getting himself arrested.
At this point Harrison Ford checks in as Woodrow Dolarhyde, a rich and influential cattleman, who also has beef with Jake. We find out that Jake had relieved Dolarhyde of his gold and now Dolarhyde wants it back along with some retribution.
It is a this point that the Aliens, mad at not getting any screen-time yet, decide to make themselves known. They show up in their spaceships and proceed to cause all sorts of mayhem as aliens are known to do. To top it all off they decide to kidnap abduct a bunch of people. Here is where Jake goes from villain to hero as he somehow uses his mysterious bracelet to shoot down one of the spaceships before they all depart.
This is where things start to fall apart. For one thing the townsfolk are remarkably calm, too calm for a group of 19th century inhabitants who have just made first contact. You would expect at least one person to declare the end of the world, label the aliens as gods and start sacrificing virgins, but no; not a single altar in sight.
Back to the “plot,” the townsfolk decide to cast aside their differences and form a posse to go after the aliens and recover their people. From here onwards all that transpires is cliché after cliché of lines and plot points that lead to a big explosion at the end.
This film has a terrible script that has numerous gaping plot-holes. Some aspect of the film which might be considered major by a casual observer, that’s you, are treated as unnecessary details and are subsequently ignored. This includes why the aforementioned posse chooses to take along on this dangerous quest, a 12 years old child.
The look of this film was also rather bland. Favreau decided to make a western with aliens in it rather than a sci-fi film with cowboys in it. The film looks rather plain and dull, something like a B movie and not what you would expect from a big-budget Hollywood film.
There is nothing special about Cowboys & Aliens in a positive sense. It is about bunch of cowboys fighting some aliens but beneath it all, the cowboys and aliens are allied with the producers of this film in taking your money, time and joy.