I Am Repelled By Wholesomeness

Cowboys & Aliens... what a stupid fucking movie. I can't believe it's real. It sounds like the kind of thing that's sold to a Hollywood executive on the title alone.

"What's the pitch?"

"Cowboys & Aliens, sir."

What's it about?"

"Um... it's about cowboys... and aliens."

"Amazing! Here's 150 million dollars!"

But that's not exactly true. The concept didn't just slide out of some oily prick's mouth one fine evening in Hollywood. The film is actually based on a comic book of the same name. No shit? Some genius came up with a stunningly brilliant concept like Cowboys & Aliens and made a comic book out of it first, before selling it to a major movie studio and taking off with a suitcase full of money like
D. B. Cooper.

I thumbed through the collected edition of the Cowboys & Aliens comic book at a Barnes & Noble once, earlier this year. It was stupid. Really stupid. Are you ready for this? It's about cowboys fighting aliens! I know, right!? Two cowboys are hired to protect some silver miners, they get attacked by some Apaches, then everybody gets attacked by the survivors of a crashed alien ship. Then the cowboys and Apaches team up to take the fight to the extraterrestrial menace.

They steal a bunch of tech from the aliens, including some scrap metal from their flying motorcycles (?!), then proceed to turn said scrap metal into horseshoes. To allow their horses to fly. Yes, the big climactic fight between the cowboys, the Apaches, and the aliens involves a bunch of dudes gunning down aliens on flying horseback. Holy shit! That's fucking ridiculous. But amazing. How completely off the wall would that be in a movie? Sure, it's really really stupid, but if you're making a movie like Cowboys & Aliens, you might as well swing for the fences.

Kinda like this. But with lasers!

The comic book is dumb, but I thought if the crew behind the film took the material and ran with it, they might deliver a campy, fun summer blockbuster. Real stupid, crowdpleasing stuff for the masses. Nothing wrong with that. Instead, the creative minds behind the film Cowboys & Aliens decided to take a long, boring shit on the silver screen. And they didn't have the courtesy to flush.

49ers From Outer Space! - A Brief Synopsis

The film tells the story of amnesiac cowboy Jake Lonergan (Daniel Craig), who wakes up in the desert with no memory, an oozing wound on his abdomen, and a death ray strapped to his wrist. He's wanted for murder and robbery, and winds up in the custody of Sherrif Taggart (Keith Carradine), the local lawman of Absolution, in the New Mexico territory. Local cattle baron Woodrow Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford) shows up with a posse, ready to string up Jake for stealing his gold, but the festivities are interrupted by the arrival of... wait for it... ALIENS!!!

The aliens swoop down from the night sky in their flying machines that don't resemble motorcycles at all, buzzing the town and kidnapping half the citizens with their amazing lasso technology, including Sherrif Taggart, the wife of local barkeep Doc (Sam Rockwell), and Dolarhyde's worthless son Percy (Paul Dano). Jake manages to shoot down one of the alien vessels with his wrist rocket, and Dolrhyde organizes another posse to track down the fleeing alien pilot, who will hopefully lead them to their missing loved ones.

The rest of the movie focues on the posse traveling across the American West as they hunt down their elusive target, while Jake grows closer to a mysterious young woman named Ella (Olivia Wilde) who is actually a shape-shifting alien out for revenge on the interstellar bastards who wiped out her species. Spoiler alert, I guess.

Clancy Brown, an actor I adore, plays a preacher who helps out Jake early on in the film, then joins the posse to kick ass for the lord. He brings a lot to his role, imbuing his character with a sense of humanity and humor sadly lacking in the rest of the main cast. So of course he dies first, impaled by the meat hooks of an angry alien. Naturally.

Always a class act.

During the posse's magical mystery tour, we're subjected to a number of oddly tepid conflicts between our heroes and the alien menace, including a limp fight sequence on a capsized river boat that's in the middle of the desert for no reason. I suppose the aliens are responsible for the state of the river boat, but there's no explanation for it in the film. It's just there. And I don't get it.

Eventually, the protagonists find out that the aliens are here to steal our gold. That's right, kids! They're here to steal all of our precious gold, because they covet it! They covet our gold! Oh my god. I can't believe it. Gold Robbers From Beyond The Stars! They're mining our gold right underneath our noses, and they're also stealing it from our homes! Treacherous bastards.

They're also abducting all these people to dissect them, in an effort to find our weaknesses. Now that's fucking flimsy. I figure they only really need to capture and study one, maybe two people to realize that their death rays do a pretty efficient job of killing us. Maybe they're just sick bastards who get their rocks off by cutting up defenseless lifeforms. I don't know, and I don't care.

Jake, who's slowly regaining his memory, hooks up with his old criminal gang (led by Walton Goggins, who brings some much-needed levity in his limited screentime) and convinces them to help him assault the aliens and rescue their kidnapped loved ones. They also team up with some Apaches who have lost people of their own to the "demons from the sky", and battle is joined.

Bullets and arrows fly, captives get rescued, and Ella suicide bombs the alien mothership as it takes off, saving the day. Everybody goes back to Absolution to enjoy their blessed reunions, and Jake rides off into the sunset, only to die of dehydration and heat exhaustion several days later. And a few of the aliens survive in the desert to give birth to the legend of the mighty Chupacabra.

Where Is Your God, Now? - Analysis

Almost nothing in this movie works.

The performances are mediocre across the board, with the exceptions being Clancy Brown and Walton Goggins, but they're barely featured in the film. Sam Rockwell does fine as "Doc", and Adam Beach is decent as "Nat", Dolarhyde's foster son, but that's really it. Keith Carradine isn't given enough screentime to leave an impression, which is a sin. Harrison Ford, who has been on autopilot for a decade, actually has moments in the film where he manages to emote, a fucking incredible thing considering the kind of film he's in. Mostly he just sleepwalks through the film, which is to be expected.

A truly riveting performance.

Olivia Wilde, who is just okay in her role on TV's House M.D., and was terrible in last year's cinematic crime against humanity TRON Legacy, does nothing to change my mind about her here. She spends most of the film staring at people with her big, empty eyes. And when the script gives her any dialogue that attempts to bring anything resembling emotion to her character, she fails to deliver with her stilted line delivery and expressionless face.

And Daniel Craig, who I loved in Layer Cake and as the new "James Bond", is just... terrible. He's trying to play a stoic archetype, but he fails miserably. I don't know what went wrong. Maybe it's the flat, unconvincing American accent he adopted for the film. I don't know if people are aware of this, but the Old West was heavily populated with immigrants. The region was a veritable melting pot of nationalities, all coming west to grab their piece of the American Dream.

It's not inconceivable to imagine a British man settling in the New Mexico territory in the late 19th Century. But I guess the producers did some market research and figured out that audiences wouldn't accept a dude with a foreign accent as the hero of this film. Bullshit.

Also, I'm tired of cinematic aliens that don't act like thinking, reasoning creatures. The beasties in Cowboys & Aliens, despite having mastered interstellar travel and particle weapon technology, lope around without clothes, roaring unintelligibly, and generally acting like wild animals. It makes no sense. They never display any characteristics of intelligence beyond that of an irate bobcat. Insulting, tired shit.

Jon Favreau brings nothing to the project as a director. He's clearly competent, but has no style that differentiates him from the rest of the nomadic journeyman filmmakers out there. But the script certainly did him no favors.

Screenwriting credits include Mark Fergus and Hank Otsby, two of the writers of the excellent Children Of Men. But the other three credited writers of that film, including director Alfonso Cuarón, along with the other writing credits of Fergus and Otsby, lead me to believe that they may not be very good at their jobs. You could make the argument that they co-wrote Iron Man, but that means little. People don't enjoy Iron Man for it's enthralling screenplay.

Two other credited screenwriters for Cowboys & Aliens are Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci. They got their start writing for the truly mediocre television series Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. They moved up in the world when they completely ripped off the film Parts: The Clonus Horror to write Michael Bay's epic nightmare The Island. Moving on, they took everything that worked in 1998's The Mask Of Zorro and tossed it in a fucking landfill to write 2005's atrocity The Legend Of Zorro. They co-wrote the first two Transformers films. They co-wrote J.J. Abrams' Star Trek in 2009.

I guess I'm trying to convince you, Dear Imaginary Reader, that these two fellows are hacks. Just a pair of no-good misfits building a career on a pyramid of shame. But that's nothing compared to the final nail in the coffin that is the screenplay for Cowboys & Aliens. One name popped up in the opening titles that gave me pause. It sent a shiver of revulsion down my spine. The movie was just beginning, and this name assured me that what I was about to watch would not end well.

That name: Steve Oedekerk.

This asshole.

This... this... thing wrote Patch Adams. It wrote the 1996 remake of The Nutty Professor. It wrote Bruce Almighty. It wrote Evan Almighty! It wrote fucking Kung Pow! Enter The Fist. It created the execrable series of thumb-related short film parodies. Bat-Thumb? Frankenthumb? Thumbtanic?

FUCK YOU! 

Seriously. Fuck you.

How is this man alive? How is he real? What have we done to deserve his abhorrent brand of comedy? I'm not a religious man, but I am inclined to believe the existence of Evil with a capital E because this creature called Steve Oedekerk walks the earth. The very fact that this man exists and has a lucrative career is enough to make a man lose all faith in humanity and go on a killing spree.

When I saw the credit "Story by Steve Oedekerk" flash across the screen in the opening moments of Cowboys & Aliens I nearly ran from the theatre, arms flailing, screaming incoherently about the downfall of the human race.

I hate Cowboys & Aliens. I hate this movie. I want to wish it out of existence like Anthony Fremont.

The film's biggest sin: no flying horses. What the fuck were they thinking?