What do you get in Cowboys & Aliens? Cowboys, for a start. Also, aliens. Daniel Craig is one of the former, and looks for a while like he might be one of the latter. We open on a sun-scorched Western landscape of red dust and thorn bushes – and Craig suddenly bursts into frame, jumping up as if from a bad dream. His clothes are blood-stained. There’s a thick metal bracelet around his wrist. He has no idea how he got there, doesn’t even know his own name – but he’s clearly a dangerous character. Three bushy cowboys appear. Seeing Dan lost and out of sorts, they try to shake him down, and soon wish they hadn’t. Turns out Dan is an outlaw named Jake Lonergan, probably the toughest hombre in the dusty little town of Absolution – his only competition being Colonel Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford), the hard-as-nails rancher who holds the town in his iron grip.
So much for the cowboys; what about the aliens? Well, that’s the problem. The aliens don’t have names, let alone personalities. They tend to appear as a deus ex machina, cutting Gordian knots and resolving stalemates – so, for instance, their first big entrance comes just as the Colonel is trying to retrieve his no-good son Percy (Paul Dano), who’s been arrested by the sheriff and is bound (along with Jake) for the Federal Marshal. Enter spaceships shooting laser beams, and the drama is forgotten; but the aliens are just generic villains, abducting humans “to study our weaknesses” ahead of a bigger invasion force.
This is feeble, and it saps the film’s energy. It’s bad enough that cowboys vs. aliens makes a ludicrous pairing, so you get cowboys shooting guns and trying to lasso aliens and so forth; it works for a few seconds as cool genre mash-up – insofar as it’s cool seeing spaceships and Stetsons in the same shot – but even 20th-century humans could make mincemeat of these rough riders, let alone extraterrestrials from a (presumably) more advanced civilisation. In short, the concept is silly – but that’s not the point. The point is that drama comes from conflict, and you don’t have conflict when one side is dramatically non-existent. Yes, the aliens are nasty, and they do a neat trick where they open up their chest – as if unbuttoning a shirt – and a pair of creepy little hands come out. But they’re mostly boring.
This is becoming an issue in multiplex movies. Super 8 was wonderful – except that, again, its monster was boring. Battle: Los Angeles was another case of big-budget mayhem with a dull antagonist. Trying to connect films and politics is a matter best left to academics, but I can’t help but wonder if our cinematic monsters are dull nowadays because we tend to demonise the Other in real life. Nuance has become a dirty word in global politics over the past 15 years: first Milosevic, then Saddam, then Bin Laden and now Gaddafi have been painted in broad, generic strokes so as to foster a climate of fear and revulsion (and of course justify military action against them). There’s a certain kind of war movie that began to flourish in the early 00s – around the time of Black Hawk Down and We Were Soldiers – where the action itself is the point, not the purpose behind it (Battle: Los Angeles is also in that genre). These films assume we’re interested in fighting for its own sake. The enemy – the monster, if you like – might as well be invisible. The West has slid into militarism, and Hollywood inevitably reflects that.
Isn’t it odd, for instance, that the cowboys in Cowboys & Aliens never really talk about their foe? They have no concept of outer space or aliens (they call them “demons”), but shouldn’t their reaction be more ambivalent? How do they know it’s not the Second Coming, or a case of divine retribution? Shouldn’t there be at least one cowboy who starts waxing apocalyptic – like the crazy lady in The Mist some years ago – instead of forming a posse and going after the varmints? But it’s not that kind of film, not just because it’s a ‘summer movie’ (read: mindless) but because it’s actually quite macho and militaristic. Sam Rockwell plays ‘Doc’, a mild-mannered type who doesn’t go in for violence and (of course) is disrespected by everyone; “Get yourself a gun and learn how to use it,” urges the local preacher – and Doc does so, learns how to shoot and finally earns some respect. There’s also a kid, a little boy whose grandpa has been snatched by the aliens – and gruff-but-fair Dolarhyde tells him a story from his own childhood, how he was forced to kill a man with a knife he still carries with him. Here’s the knife, concludes the Colonel, and hands it to the boy; “Be a man!” he adds gruffly, and sends him off to slaughter aliens.
‘Cowboys and aliens’ is an obvious play on ‘cowboys and Indians’, and some Indians duly appear, treated with reverence as befits Native Americans – making it ironic that the film paints its aliens the way old B-Westerns painted their Apaches, i.e. faceless and disposable (it makes you wonder if we’ve really come a long way since the 1950s, or just moved sideways). None of that would matter, I suspect, if Cowboys & Aliens were smart and entertaining – but it’s no more than average, and the problematic bits pull it down to below-average. Craig still has presence, for what it’s worth, though he looks scarier than ever. The action scenes aren’t incoherent. Ford is mostly grumpy – but he gets a moment when he smiles, and the old Indiana Jones twinkle is back. Oh, and of course you get cowboys. And aliens.
DIRECTED BY Jon Favreau
STARRING Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford, Olivia Wilde
US 2011 118 mins.
