Artificial Grit
According to Movieinsider.com, Cowboys and Aliens cost $100 million to make. Such information would normally be irrelevant, except for the fact that this week a different alien invasion movie, Attack the Block (made for only a fraction of Cowboys and Aliens’ price), turns out a thousand times better. Media dupes will pay more attention to Cowboys and Aliens (because it comes pre-sold as a video game and has a $30 million ad budget to inflate its significance) but here’s the truth: Cowboys and Aliens only offers the routine "thrills" that money will buy, while Attack the Block—the year’s best action-adventure film—has beauty, humor and intelligence money can’t buy.
Executive producer Steven Spielberg continues the disappointing new arc of his career as the presenter of junk like Super 8 and Transformers: Dark of the Moon. In each film, Spielberg disgraces his own signature themes, the relationship between humans and aliens and the frisson of the familiar facing the unknown. It was clear from his great War of the Worlds of 2005 that 9/11 had turned Spielberg’s famous sci-fi benevolence into skepticism. After the spiritual apex of summer 2001′s A.I., Spielberg began to show a suspicion of extraterrestrial others and see malevolence in their assorted intrusions.
Now, Cowboys and Aliens sets this paranoia in the Old West, where an outlaw (Daniel Craig), land baron (Harrison Ford) and settlers (Keith Carradine, Sam Rockwell) battle invaders from outer space who seek gold ore to power their ultimate assault—an intergalactic jihad. If that premise sounds exciting, just wait until you see the predictable, politically shallow, unconvincing nonsense that Spielberg and director Jon Favreau have made.
Apparently, $100 million means you won’t risk asking audiences to think about their fear of the Other or the racial and territorial issues of the American West. Merely after a circus, Spielberg sanctioned the hack Favreau, whose lucrative but unimaginative Iron Man movies have consistently bested Spielberg’s recent box office numbers, to deliver profitable claptrap. (Spielberg should be leading fanboys to appreciate the visionaries John Moore and Paul W.S. Anderson.) Neither a classic western nor a parody, Cowboys and Aliens misuses generic aspects of the western, failing to update the historical notions of civilization vs. wilderness. Instead, video game frivolity predominates. The late-arriving Native American characters don’t figure into a new vision of cultural difference, they’re merely exotic—harbingers of mysticism and resurrection—while the film indulges a silly, violent fear of surrogate aliens.
Super 8′s alien baddies were asinine enough, but here they come again.
These vicious creatures quit their reservation (without mentioning the Native American response to territorial expansion) through advanced, jet-propelled spacecraft that lasso humans and yank them up into their ships like rodeo cattle. When acting aggressively, these aliens open their crustacean-like crotches to reveal ugly, grasping talons, gross threats to human life (still failing to articulate a parallel to eminent domain).
Cowboys and Aliens says nothing about U.S. cultural history, which makes it inferior to Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor’s script for Jimmy Hayward’s Jonah Hex, which used the same post- Civil War period to address post-9/11 anxieties. (Critics and fanboys who disrespected its non-blockbuster status ignored its fascinating themes.) Jonah Hex’s conflicted hero is replaced with Craig’s amnesiac settler who awakens bewildered after an abduction; fighting the aliens relieves his backstory of criminal responsibility. This confused sense of heroism extends to Ford’s quasi-John Wayne role as a he-man racist who must resolve his issues with Indians, Mexicans and his bratty son (Paul Dano, carrying the stench of There Will Be Blood).
Favreau can’t blend these disparate elements (who could?); his hackwork merely gets the F/X on screen with no style or wit. He flubs the Spielbergian shot of an upside-down riverboat in the desert (like the ocean liner in Close Encounters) and cheapens Spielberg’s signature reunion scenes—even between Ford and Dano. As in the Iron Man movies, Favreau shows no feeling for visualizing ideas. (Typically, a joke about needing matches misses its obvious visual punch line.) Bad as J.J. Abrams with Super 8, Favreau botches the Spielberg motifs: the aliens hoarding their loot of gold teeth, glasses and watches, and the metaphysical transformation of a female alien. His method is to bilk bored, mindless audiences with half-joking, half sincere exploits, fight scenes featuring pig bladder punching noises and pointless rifle vs. spacecraft shootouts.
Attack the Block and Jonah Hex both enhanced their genres with an inspired revamping of familiar conventions. But Cowboys and Aliens is an uninspired, third-rate rehash of Western and monster movie lore. It turns genre into formula. Spielberg has done the unthinkable: After laying the groundwork for mythological pop cinema, he has proceeded to destroy its appeal via minion hack directors who not only lack his flair but trivialize his basic humanist message.
>>Cowboys and Aliens
Directed by Jon Favreau Running time: 118 min.