Cowboys & Aliens (2011) | Sci-Fi Saturdays

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The Old West meets the Final Frontier!

Cowboys & Aliens is a fun film that doesn’t take itself too seriously. It takes a tried and true story of the old West and combines it with a tale of alien invaders abducting humans and plundering the planet’s riches. Throw in some popular actors and a hot director, and let’s see what shakes out.

First Impressions

In the old West, a man is abducted by aliens and returned to his ranch with a strange gauntlet on his wrist. A strange aircraft later flies over the town, and the man’s gauntlet turns into a laser gun and blasts it out of the sky. A posse of men, including Harrison Ford, ride into a canyon and see a large, strange, metal tower and more spaceships. It’s unclear what exactly to expect in a film titled Cowboys & Aliens, or is it?

Presented below is the trailer for the film.

The Fiction of The Film

In 1873, Jake Lonergan (Daniel Craig) awakens, wounded, in the middle of the wilderness with a strange metal bracelet attached to his left wrist. Three men ride up to him to take him in for a reward, and he kills all of them. At the nearby town of Absolution, he breaks into the church and cleans up before being captured by Meachum (Clancy Brown), the preacher. Meachum fixes his wounds and lets him go. In town, Jake stops Percy Dolarhyde (Paul Dano), the entitled son of rancher Colonel Woodrow Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford) from shooting the bartender, Doc (Sam Rockwell). Both men are arrested by Sheriff Taggart (Keith Carradine) to be transferred to the Federal Marshal the next day.

Some mysterious lights eviscerate three of Dolarhyde’s men and a herd of his cows. Dolarhyde heads into town to spring his son. Jake has no memory of what happened before he awoke in the wilderness, but he’s told he killed a woman whom he sees in his flashbacks. Strange lights appear in the sky that night as alien spaceships bombard the town, killing many and abducting others, including the Sheriff, Percy, and Doc’s wife Maria (Ana de la Reguera). The bracelet on Jake’s wrist comes alive, and he uses it like a gun, shooting down one of the ships. The next morning, Dolarhyde organizes a posse. Having been to the homestead in his dreams, Jake remembers the woman, Alice (Abigail Spencer), and how he returned with some gold that mysteriously melts and rises up through the roof.

Jake joins the posse, which includes Dolarhyde, Doc, Meachum, Taggart’s grandson Emmett (Noah Ringer), Dolarhyde’s native American helper Nat (Adam Beach), and a mysterious woman, Ella (Olivia Wilde), plus other employees of Dolarhyde. A thunderstorm rolls in, and the posse takes shelter in a riverboat in the middle of the desert, presumably put there by the aliens. An alien attacks the group that night, killing Meachum as he tries to protect Emmett. They manage to wound it, and Nat follows the trail of blood to a canyon where the group is attacked by Jake’s old gang, including his old second in command, Hunt (Walton Goggins). Jake kills the new gang leader, Dolan (David O’Hara), and the posse escapes as another wave of alien spaceships fly through. One grabs Ella, but Jake manages to save her and bring down the craft, killing the alien, but not before it kills Ella.

The posse is then captured by the local Apache tribe led by Black Knife (Raoul Trujillo). They burn the body of Ella that evening, and she is reborn in flames. She reveals that she is the last of an alien race that was killed by the ones now on Earth. She has vowed to destroy them. The aliens steal gold and abduct locals to experiment on, she tells them. Jake remembers being abducted with Alice, who was vivisected by the aliens right before his eyes. Jake took control of the bracelet device and scarred one of the aliens during his escape. He knows where their ship is located. Along with the Apache tribe, Jake gets his old gang to help out. A group of men throw dynamite into the alien landing bay, preventing their ships from leaving.

As alien creatures leave the ship to attack the humans, Jake and Ella find a way inside. The aliens are extracting and melting gold to power their ship. Dolarhyde is attacked and thrown from his horse, but Nat saves him, but dies in the process. Inside the ship, Ella frees the hostages as Jake blasts the aliens with his bracelet gun. Young Emmett manages to kill an alien when he is backed into a cave. As they are escaping, the scar-faced alien grabs Jake and beats him, but Dolarhyde intervenes, and they make it out together. Ella stays behind with the bracelet, which she has converted into a bomb. Jake turns off the gold extractor, dropping molten gold on aliens.

The ship begins to lift off as Jake and Dolarhyde get free. When it seems as if the ship will get away, Ella triggers the bomb and the entire ship explodes, raining a shower of gold all over the canyon. With the hostages returned to the town, everyone is happy, especially since there’s now enough gold in the hills to make Absolution a prosperous town. Percy has learned humility as his father puts him in charge of part of the business, and then Woodrow buys a drink for everyone in the bar. Jake is concerned that he will still be brought up on murder charges, but Sheriff Taggart and Dolarhyde assure him he’s safe. They both heard that Jake died in the caves, saving everyone. Jake rides off into the sunset.

“If we let them leave, they’ll come back with more and there will be no survivors. That’s what they did to my people.” – Ella

History in the Making

Cowboys & Aliens was Jon Favreau’s follow-up film to his blockbuster initial entries into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Iron Man (2008) and Iron Man 2 (2010), and his third comic book film in a row. He had made a name for himself directing smaller independent films like Swingers and Made before making the family-oriented films Elf and Zathura. This film feels like nothing else he’s made. For starters, it’s a Western film.  The genre had experienced yet another Hollywood revival circa 2007 with the remake of 3:10 to Yuma, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, No Country For Old Men, and There Will Be Blood. A remake of True Grit by the Coen Brothers was released in 2010, this film in 2011, and Django Unchained by Quentin Tarantino followed in 2012. American audiences always seem to enjoy the revival of this type of film due to its ability to tell stories about strong characters in difficult times. Couple that to the science-fiction genre, which often deals with man having to learn some universal truth, and there’s one hell of an outing.

The story of this film was loosely adapted from a graphic novel of the same name, published in 2006 by Platinum Studios. It was based on a concept by publisher Scott Mitchell Rosenberg and written by  Fred Van Lente and Andrew Foley, with illustrations by Dennis Calero and Luciano Lima. Comic books have been mining the space-western for some time, especially in a post-Star Wars world. Marvel Comics has characters like Star-Lord and The Guardians of the Galaxy, which are space-oriented Westerns. The Fantastic Four visited a parallel Earth with robotic horses and space-cowboys during John Byrne’s 1980s run. Even the Ghost Rider is a modern-day incarnation of a Western hero. Even DC Comics got into the fun by taking the Western anti-hero Jonah Hex (who had his own 2010 film) and sending him into an apocalyptic future in Hex. Yet many of these crazy genre mashups have never made it to the silver screen. Perhaps it’s a lack of confidence in the interest of such a project, but it also may be that filmmakers feel the stories are too derivative of what has come before.

Genre-fication

Cowboys & Aliens is what’s called a high-concept picture. That’s a film that can be easily pitched with a succinctly stated premise, see also Snakes on a Plane. It’s a movie about cowboys and aliens, but also Indians [sic], land barons, saloon owners, desperados, and gold. Lots of gold in them thar hills. When audiences think about the collision of Westerns and Science-Fiction, it’s usually more of the operatic space Westerns. Star Trek has always been described as “Wagon Train to the Stars” which makes films like Battlestar Galactica (Wagon Train-esque), Outland (Rio Bravo), and Battle Beyond the Stars (The Magnificent Seven) seem like the natural progression of a space Western. Those were made at a time when the more popular sci-fi aspects were put on display. One of the few 80s sci-fi films that bucked this process was Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone, as it had more of a gritty Western style. In recent years, films like Ghosts of Mars, Serenity, and the upcoming John Carter deal with the science-fiction elements but in a much purer Western setting (whether that’s on Mars or some other dusty, barren planet). The aliens are a mostly fresh take on a bipedal species with multiple arms. No man in a suit for these bad boys. There’s a surprise set of smaller arms located within their chest cavity, which is reminiscent of the queen xenomorph in Aliens, or more recently, Harry from Resident Alien.

In terms of science-fiction, this film goes the other direction, placing its setting in the Old West and letting the aliens come to the humans. Cowboys & Aliens is 75% western and only 25% science-fiction. It embraces the themes and style of the western long before the aliens arrive. It includes horses, men with dusters and six-shooters, cattle rustlers, and men who have given up searching for gold in the local hills, causing the town to go dry. It contains the quintessential western town from films like Silverado or Gunfight at the OK Corral. The antagonist, Colonel Dolarhyde, is an amalgamation of Little Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman) from Clint Eastwood’s revival western Unforgiven and the character Herod (also Gene Hackman) from Sam Raimi’s The Quick and The Dead. Both are mean control freaks that see their way as the only way, with Herod also being a jerk of a father who mistreats his son, causing the boy to act out with the locals. The film also, interestingly, pays homage to a cult film from the late 70s, Laserblast, as Jake carries around an alien weapon that he can control. In that film, a teenager finds a laser gun dropped by an alien in the desert and uses it to get even with the bullies in his life. Jake’s gauntlet doesn’t change him in the same way as the protagonist of Laserblast is affected, and may seem a stretch, but how many films feature a plot point so eccentric as this?

Societal Commentary

In my opinion, the best part of Cowboys & Aliens is the cowboys fighting the aliens. But close behind that, in terms of interesting thematic design, is the idea of Manifest Destiny at play. For those that failed to pay attention in 8th-grade American History, Manifest Destiny is the (primarily) 19th-century belief that the United States was ordained, divinely no less, to spread its country Westward to the furthest reaches of the continent, usurping the land from Native Americans. The Apache tribe, led by Black Knife, is said to be the last of their kind in this area, with many having been killed and others run off by the expanding frontier of the United States. Just as these indigenous tribes were herded and corralled by the White man, so too do the people of Absolution feel the lash of the Aliens. Aliens that have come for the gold, and couldn’t care less about the people that currently occupy the land. The humans become game and cattle as they are hunted and experimented upon. However, in this telling of the Intergalactic Destiny of this alien race, the humans fight back and win, unlike our real-world expansion against the Native Americans.

Cowboys & Aliens also plays around with the notion of the human antagonist. In the standard Western tale, the robber baron/landowner is often portrayed as the villain. The Young Guns films showed that people with money made the rules. Ford’s Dolarhyde is set up as just such a character. He’s an SOB, and so is his son, humiliating and taking from the already poor townsfolk. It’s only when the unknown invaders present a threat to all the humans of the territory and capture his son that Dolarhyde grudgingly teams up with the others. Everybody who goes with him does so because they, too, have lost someone, including Jake, though his loss was in the past. He is really more interested in discovering his missing memory. So even though Jake would prefer to go on his own, he discovers that working as a group provides better results. Dolarhyde also realizes the value in the team-up, putting aside his station to work with the townsfolk, and also working with the Indians, whom he feels are beneath him. This is personified by Nat, who is a local native who works on Dolarhyde’s farm, and is seen as not much better than a slave. Nat looks up to Woodrow as a father, but Woodrow cannot see how much he has impressed upon the young man until it’s too late. Especially since Woodrow’s own son is incapable of professing his admiration for his father. It’s an interesting twist that keeps Ford’s character from becoming a caricature or fully vile character, and in keeping with the actor’s much-loved screen roles.

The Science in The Fiction

What makes Cowboys & Aliens an intriguing watch is the disparity of the technology between the aliens and the cowboys. Just as the Native Americans found it hard to contend fighting the White man with their spears and arrows, the humans–armed only with simple six-shooter guns or rifles, must contend against flying machines and plasma weapons. It begs the question: how can they ever hope to win? In this David vs Goliath story, is it any surprise that David manages to outsmart Goliath? Maybe it is also lucky. These aliens don’t seem to have any other predators on the planet (not even the common cold), so their supremacy seems assured. Luckily, the humans still have some tricks up their sleeves, aided by Jake, who has one piece of advanced technology to level the playing field somewhat. They also have the mysterious Ella, who is a shapeshifting alien (or at least one that can assume the guise of a human female). She provides some intelligence to Jake and Woodrow about what they’re facing and how to rescue the hostages before using her knowledge to blow up the alien ship. Fortunately, the aliens are prone to fits of revenge and rage, just like humans, otherwise, Jake would never have been able to escape from their ship.

The Final Frontier

In what other movie do audiences get to see Indiana Jones going up against James Bond (aside from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade)? The cast of the film is just phenomenal, from its leads all the way down to its supporting players. Daniel Craig plays the strong and silent gunslinger who reluctantly must team-up with others against his nature. Harrison Ford plays against type as a gruff and dangerous ex-Army officer in what may be his only true villainous role. Though his character, Dolarhyde (who was named after the killer in Silence of the Lambs), does soften as the story progresses, revealing himself as more traumatized from the War and misunderstood by others. Olivia Wilde makes her second sci-fi film in a row (of three), following TRON: Legacy, and continuing with In Time. Throw in classic supporting actors like Keith Carradine, Adam Beach, Clancy Brown, Sam Rockwell (who dances in all his films. Don’t believe me? Check it out!), and a blink and you’ll miss it cameo from Wyatt Russell in one of his earliest roles, rounds out a fun ensemble film. Yet there are still aspects of the film that don’t work as well as expected. Many of the film’s plot elements are couched in tropes of the Western or Sci-Fi genres, which may deter some viewers. Still, Cowboys & Aliens is a fun throwback to a 60s style genre mashup paying homage to both genres, but not quite finding the synergy to create something greater.

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