Jon Favreau’s Cowboys & Aliens has a title that tells you everything and a movie that tells you almost nothing. The 2011 space Western stars Daniel Craig as an amnesiac outlaw with a metal shackle on his wrist, Harrison Ford as a cattleman who wants him dead, and Olivia Wilde as a woman who knows more than she lets on. It runs 119 minutes. It was made for $163 million. It has aliens in it, and cowboys, and a town called Absolution, and none of that is the problem.
Trailer, via cowboysandaliensfilm.
A Man Walks Into Absolution
The opening is the best thing in the film. A man wakes in the desert of the 1873 New Mexico Territory, wounded, with no memory and a strange metal bracelet locked to his left wrist. He walks into Absolution, where the preacher Meacham treats his wound. Sheriff John Taggart identifies him as Jake Lonergan, an outlaw. Jake fights the arrest, and Ella Swenson, a mysterious woman, steps in to interfere.
That is a clean setup, and Craig plays it with a stillness that works. He does not explain himself, because he cannot. The bracelet sits on his arm like a question the movie keeps promising to answer.
The Standoff Before the Ships
Colonel Woodrow Dolarhyde arrives with armed men. He wants his son Percy released, and he wants Jake handed over for stealing his gold. Percy is a petulant young drunkard, played by Paul Dano, and the standoff between Dolarhyde’s men and the sheriff is the film’s second-best scene.
Then the alien ships attack. Grappling cables fire from the sky and pull Percy, Taggart, and other townsfolk up into the ships. Jake’s bracelet activates and becomes a weapon. He shoots down a ship. The attack ends.
It is a good sequence, and it is where the film’s central problem starts. Everything that follows is a chase, and the chase has no shape.
The Posse That Falls Apart
Dolarhyde, Ella, and other townsfolk form a posse to track an injured alien that escaped the downed ship. Jake travels to an abandoned cabin and remembers, in a flashback, returning there with stolen gold, only to be abducted along with his lover Alice by the aliens. His memories return. He joins the posse.
The group finds a paddle wheel steamboat lying on its side, far from any river big enough to float it — the aliens left it there. They make camp inside the wreck. That night the alien kills Meacham, who gives his life to save Emmett, Taggart’s grandson. By morning, most of the posse have deserted. Jake’s former gang attacks the rest. Jake, who stole the gang’s loot after their last heist, tries and fails to retake control. The aliens attack again and abduct Ella. Jake jumps aboard the ship and attacks the alien.
That is a lot of plot. None of it builds. The steamboat is a striking image with no reason to exist. The gang arrives and leaves. Meacham dies so that a boy we barely know can live, and the film treats it as a beat to hit rather than a loss to feel.
Five Writers and a Graphic Novel
Cowboys & Aliens is based on the 2006 Platinum Studios graphic novel of the same name, created by Scott Mitchell Rosenberg. The screenplay is credited to Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, Damon Lindelof, Mark Fergus, and Hawk Ostby, from a screen story by Fergus, Ostby, and Steve Oedekerk. Brian Grazer, Ron Howard, Kurtzman, Orci, and Rosenberg produced. Steven Spielberg and Favreau were executive producers.
Five writers is not automatically a fault. Here it shows. The film cannot decide whether it is a straight Western that happens to have aliens or a genre mashup that winks at itself, so it does both, badly, in alternating scenes.
The project began development in April 1997, when Universal Pictures and DreamWorks Pictures bought film rights to a concept Rosenberg pitched. After the graphic novel was published in 2006, development restarted. Favreau signed on as director in September 2009. Filming began in June 2010 in New Mexico and California. Favreau chose to shoot traditionally and in anamorphic format despite studio pressure to release the film in 3-D.
That last decision was correct. The film looks like a Western. It has dust and wide horizons and faces that belong in a John Ford picture. The craft is not the failure.
Craig, Ford, and Wilde
Craig is good. He has the right face for this — hard, quiet, a little dead behind the eyes — and he sells the amnesia without commentary. Ford is doing a version of a role he has done before, the powerful man who learns humility, and he is fine, though the script gives him little to do but growl and then soften.
Wilde has the hardest job. Ella is a mystery the film withholds for too long, and Wilde plays the withholding rather than a person. Sam Rockwell, as Doc, is the only cast member who seems to be having fun, and the film does not know what to do with him. Adam Beach as Nat Colorado, Clancy Brown as Meacham, Walton Goggins as Hunt, Keith Carradine as Sheriff Taggart — all competent, all underused.
The cast is not the problem. The script is.
What the Film Gets Wrong
The aliens are the least interesting thing in Cowboys & Aliens. They have no motive beyond abduction, no culture, no face the film bothers to give them. They are a plot device with a spaceship, and when the final showdown comes, there is nothing at stake except survival, which is the lowest possible stake.
The film’s tagline is “First Contact. Last Stand.” That is two movies in four words, and Cowboys & Aliens never picks one. First contact stories are about understanding. Last stand stories are about sacrifice. This film wants the imagery of both and the meaning of neither.
The bracelet is the clearest example. It is introduced as a mystery, it becomes a weapon, and it is never explained in any way that matters. A good film would make the answer to that mystery the emotional core. This one makes it a gadget.
The Numbers
- Runtime: 119 minutes
- Budget: $163 million
- Release year: 2011
- Setting: 1873 New Mexico Territory
- Metacritic: 50/100
- Source material: 2006 Platinum Studios graphic novel by Scott Mitchell Rosenberg
- Director: Jon Favreau
- Screenplay: Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, Damon Lindelof, Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby
- Cast: Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford, Olivia Wilde, Sam Rockwell, Adam Beach, Paul Dano, Noah Ringer
Where the Money Went
A $163 million budget buys a lot of ship, a lot of desert, and a lot of actors. It does not buy a reason to care. The film’s scale is its own argument against it: the bigger the showdown gets, the smaller the people in it feel.
Ranking the film’s problems, in order of how much they hurt:
- The aliens have no character, no motive, and no memorable design.
- The plot is a series of events rather than a story with a shape.
- Ella’s mystery is withheld past the point of interest.
- The supporting cast is wasted, Rockwell most of all.
- The bracelet is a promise the film never keeps.
The first item is the one that sinks it. A Western works on archetypes. A science fiction film works on ideas. Cowboys & Aliens has archetypes and no ideas, which means the aliens are just a bigger gang of outlaws with better weapons.
What Actually Works
The first thirty minutes are genuinely good. The amnesia, the town, the standoff, the first attack — that is a movie. Craig’s physical presence carries it. Favreau shoots the desert with respect and the anamorphic frame gives the whole thing a weight that the script does not earn.
And the steamboat is a real image. An alien dragging a paddle wheeler into the middle of nowhere is the kind of detail that suggests a stranger, better film. It is the one moment where Cowboys & Aliens feels like it might be about something.
It is not. It is a $163 million genre exercise that mistakes a premise for a story. The cast is strong, the craft is solid, and the result is a film that runs 119 minutes and leaves nothing behind.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
