Cowboys and Aliens

3 Stars

Wait, cowboys and aliens? In the face of constant, competitive challenges, the movie industry clings to a handful of truths, among them: Sex sells; concessions pay the bills; Taylor Lautner may have trouble headlining a movie on his own; and a film can deal in cowboys, or it can traffic in aliens, but probably it cannot accommodate both. Just because no one's tried it before doesn't mean it's worth trying.

And yet "Cowboys & Aliens," in which Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford take on creatures from another genre, turns out to be the unlikeliest good movie of the year. The component genre parts coexist, excitingly, without veering into camp or facetious desperation. Alien-invasion aficionados should be pleased. Western nostalgists may be pleasantly surprised. Fans of cowboys-versus-aliens movies, well, it's been a long wait and here's your movie.

The 2006 Platinum Studios Comics graphic novel of the same name, created by Scott Mitchell Rosenberg and written by Fred Van Lente and Andrew Foley, has been stripped for parts and used as a mere outline for a newly hatched tale of a desperado, played by Craig, who wakes up one day in the New Mexico Territory desert (the year is 1875) with a strange metallic weapon locked to his forearm and no memory of a recent alien encounter. It all comes back to him in due course. Ford is the rapacious cattle baron who rules the dinky mining town of Absolution, but who has a heart somewhere in there underneath all that leathery guff.

He gets his chance to prove it when an uneasy alliance of hold-up artists, ranch hands and townsfolk (Sam Rockwell plays Doc, the saloonkeeper, and no one could play a saloonkeeper named Doc better) conspires to send the aliens -- prospectors of a highly evolved sort -- back to their alien land. First, though, Craig, the mysterious woman portrayed by Olivia Wilde (she of the piercing otherworldly gaze) and the Civil War veteran played by Ford must retrieve friends and loved ones abducted in the film's first big action sequence. You'll know by the end of this early scene, featuring crablike, 10-legged flying spacecraft equipped with a sophisticated form of lasso, if you're in or you're out.

Directed by Jon Favreau, "Cowboys & Aliens" is one of this year's many big-budget projects executive produced by Steven Spielberg. As in "Super 8" (also executive produced by Spielberg), Favreau's film freely samples much of Spielberg's own storied career, from "Close Encounters" on out. Favreau and his quintet of credited screenwriters also riff on half the Westerns ever made, notably "Shane" and "The Searchers," plus various less monumental efforts. The movie cannot quite support its attempts to take the milieu and the mythology as seriously as all that. Yet Favreau, a workmanlike but improving director when it comes to shaping complex matters of visual mayhem, has an ace in the hole, revealed in, among others, the first "Iron Man." He knows how to get audiences to take absurd conceits seriously without killing them with solemnity.

That said, the aliens here are damn frightening and certain moments involving an innocent, wide-eyed, "Shane"-bred boy and various near-death experiences recall "Alien," "Predator" and a few other movies too rough for 11- or 12-year-olds. The violence stays heavy, and fairly brutal, throughout, even when it's old-fashioned, non-alien Western violence. Graphic novel creator Rosenberg published the "Men in Black" comics back in the early 1990s; "Cowboys & Aliens" works with a somewhat heavier touch than, for example, Barry Sonnenfeld brought to the first "Men in Black" movie.

Yet I admire Favreau's insistence on grounding this cockamamie premise in a world we can believe in, even if it's just a movie world. The writers honor the time-honored contours of a variety of different Western tropes, among them the gathering of the manhunt posse (or alien hunt); the stranger in town, brave and agile and gym-toned enough to set things right; the overmatched but honorable sheriff (Keith Carradine, wonderful -- he should be required to make at least one Western a year the rest of his acting life), doing what he can to establish the peace. The climax involves Native Americans and their oppressors coming together to fight a common, apolitical enemy (the graphic novel drew more explicit parallels between Manifest Destiny and interstellar colonization), and it could've used a 10-minute shave. Yet Craig and Ford bring the gravitas, the sterling supporting cast brings the color and the drooling aliens, who have little claws hidden inside their stomachs, bring the novelty and ick factors. Call it "How the West Was Overrun, or Nearly." It's a disarming mash-up.

 

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"Cowboys and Aliens" Movie Trailer

 

MPAA rating: PG-13 (for intense sequences of western and sci-fi action and violence, some partial nudity and a brief crude reference).

Running time: 1:58.

Cast: Daniel Craig (Jake Lonergan); Harrison Ford (Col. Dolarhyde); Olivia Wilde (Ella); Sam Rockwell (Doc); Adam Beach (Nat); Paul Dano (Percy); Noah Ringer (Emmett); Keith Carradine (Sheriff Taggart); Clancy Brown (Meacham).

Credits: Directed by Jon Favreau; written by Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, Damon Lindelof, Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby; produced by Brian Grazer, Ron Howard, Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci and Scott Mitchell Rosenberg. A Universal Pictures release.

 

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