Cowboys & Aliens Reviews

Daniel Craig was great. Ford had his moments. But this movie could have been so so so much better!

A

Totally entertaining! James Bond and Indiana Jones work together to battle against aliens in Western.
Directed by Jon Favreau - as much harking back to his overlooked Zathura (2005) as Iron Man (2009) - Cowboys & Aliens put its not-too-many human characters front and centre. A straightforward, linear plot is also offered; lean, rather than bloated and, while skipping over a few gaping holes, it largely makes sense.
Along the way is delivered pleasing action sequences, during which you can actually make out what's going on. The visual effects assist rather than burden the storytelling adding to the atmosphere (instead of sucking it out). Favreau's genre mash-up is not groundbreaking or perfect, but it is traditional and charming - and that counts for a lot.
Cowboys & Aliens also feels refreshingly unsterilised. The lead character smokes. There is a scene in which a child is given a knife as a gift and, later, uses it to stab an alien to death. The whole production has a gritty, sweaty, blood-smeared look, recalling the revisionist "oaters" of the late '60s onwards, as opposed to the crisper offerings of the genre's golden age. This ain't aliens versus Shane; it's aliens versus The Man With No Name and The Wild Bunch.
Bullets, arrows, spears, teeth and claws puncture flesh, with gouts of blood flowing. Wounds need sewing up and spent gun-barrels sear skin. One action beat even sees an alien being messily offed by dynamite... tethered to a dagger.
As the Clint-esque, amnesiac bad-hat Jake Lonergan, Daniel Craig is an intense presence; laconic, simmering and brutal, a creature of bone-snapping action rather than whip-smart wit.
Along him we have Harrison Ford's town-bullying ranch-man who shifts gears from leathery grump mode (at the outset) to something with a glimmer of his Dr. Jones twinkle. Ford's occasional interjections prove welcome, including one which viewers will be tempted to imagine was the actor's own reaction to the script. At a campfire conflab, it is revealed that the green, bug-eyed interlopers are on Earth because there's gold in that planet.
Even so, Lonergan and Dolarhyde make for a dour pairing, both characters defined by loss, tragedy and inky-dark pasts. There's none of the Iron Man films' sense of irreverence - just grim people dealing with a grim situation. There's little lightness from the supporting cast, either. Olivia Wilde is a shimmering, otherworldly presence in a multi-layered yet underwritten romantic-interest role, Sam Rockwell jitters and whines as a rattled barkeep and Adam Beach pines for a father-figure as one of Ford's stooges.

A fresh, fun and wickedly original adventure that just blows you away. One of the biggest, boldest and most explosive movies of the year. An instant classic. A wild, epic and tremendously entertaining genre-bender that is unlike anything you have ever seen. Director, Jon Favreau scores once again with a great new sci-fi action flick that has a great creative style and dazzling locations. It`s smart, well-crafted, funny and loaded with eye-popping action. A non-stop roller-coaster ride of kinetic thrills and frequent fun. A mind-blowing and spectacular action-packed adventure. I loved it. It`s a total blast. A brilliant mixture of science-fiction, old-school western style, sharp-shooting action, suspense and amazing special effects. It`s one hell of an exhilarating, unforgettable and adrenaline-charged movie ride that you will want to see over an over again. It totally delivers, especially with its all-star cast, more noticeably with its two legendary leads. Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford are at their best. Ford is excellent as always. Craig is sensational. Olivia Wilde is absolutely stunning, shes a movie star in the making.

Saddle up and get ready for action, because this is one exciting ride of a movie that is guaranteed to knock your socks off. For some reason beyond me though, opinions seem to be very diverted about this film. Some have naught but love for it, while others express severe disappointment. Well, I can tell you right now that I'm permanently settled in the "loved it" camp.

I mean, how can you not like a movie with such a heaven-sent ensemble of phenomenal thespians? There's Harrison Ford, who still plays all his aces. Olivia Wilde, as the stunning and mysterious Ella Swenson. Daniel Craig, who I thought was even better here than in the Bond movies. Not to mention Sam Rockwell, Clancy Brown, Paul Dano and Keith Carradine.

As one of my friends pointed out, there's not much of a plot, but what it's got in abundance is a great sense of fun and adventure. Everything is set up to near-perfection, for what culminates in a epic battle between cowboys, aliens and a few other unexpected factions which I'm gonna refrain from spoiling here. Let's just say that there's some cool and interesting twists to the story, that added extra spice to the already well-tasting soup.

I had a feeling I was in for some good popcorn movie fare, but I did not at all anticipate it would be this jaw-droppingly awesome. A seamless fusion between sci-fi and the Old West, that entertains, captivates and leaves you with an appetite for more. Great fun all the way and a given addition to my "Top 100 Movies of All-Time" list.

Update (2012-11-14): Didn't love it as much on the second watch, so I lowered my rating from 4 to 3 1/2 stars.

A misfire of massive proportions, "Cowboys & Aliens" isn't fun. Isn't entertaining. Isn't watchable. "Cowboys & Aliens" is just a series of "isn't"s.

The story, taken from a popular graphic novel, does not scale down to feature film proportions very well. The central idea is clever, but the moment you start to introduce the characters the movie starts to stink.

Surprisingly Daniel Craig is terrible in the central role. He lacks the mysterious, brooding intensity Jake Lonergan needs to anchor this story. He is the first figure we meet and you stop caring about him the moment his story begins to unfold. His story is so conventional and cliched that it surprises very little as the full story is unveiled. Perhaps Craig was just too confused about his character so he didn't know how to effectively play him, but he's a total miss.

Harrison Ford tries to have fun with his character Woodrow Dolarhyde but he's just as lost. He's supposed to be one of the most feared men in the West transforming from heartless to a man with a heart, but that transformation is done so superficially that it has no impact.

Going down the list to the rest of the cast is pointless as mostly everyone seems lost and plays their characters as stock as possible. Even the titular Aliens seem to be extras from other superior flicks with aliens. Hell, they even made Predators look like villains from a Shakespeare play.

The fault belongs to director Jon Favreau (so magnificent with Iron Man) and the hoard of writers on the project. They fail to assemble "Cowboys & Aliens" into anything worth enjoying. A true disappointment.

It's unclear whether the filmmakers meant this to be a silly, light hearted adventure or a serious sci-fi adaptation. Either way, the picture fails to captivate. Jon Favreau is a talented director. A string of his productions: Elf, Zathura and Iron Man, were all superior successes under his guidance. Oh yeah, some guy named Steven Spielberg is one of the executive producers. The fact that seven (!) writers are credited with the disorganized screenplay supports the old adage "too many cooks". A simplified, more singular vision would have been preferable. The best special effects extravaganzas are able to work in an engaging objective that makes the endeavor interesting, irregardless of eye catching embellishments. Here, the CGI is the story. It's telling that when key people die in the end, it causes no emotional reaction. It's just business as usual and off to the next adventure. >Yawn<

It's a Choose Your Own Adventure with Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford, Olivia Wilde and Sam Rockwell (whom I mistook for a young Gary Oldman, my bad). The character development was surprisingly satisfying (like Ford's relationship with the young Indian), and the ridiculousness made great joke fodder for me and my equally ridiculous co-watcher. Was a fun outing. Would NOT see again.

There isnt really alot to say about this movie apart from the fact it failed in every aspect of the word!
Cowboys and Aliens is an intriguing and awesome concept and it had so much potental in that idea however everything from start to finish was just a big mess!
The cast is great however the acting is average! The storyline is boring and quite frankly i couldnt remember a single characters name from the movie as i was the uninterested in the movie!
Had potential and could have been really creative however this movie just fails!

How did this not work? For a movie called Cowboys and Aliens, it's kinda light on the Aliens and heavy on Cowboys...but the Cowboys don't do exciting Cowboy stuff, they mostly talk. I mean all the elements are there, but it just kinda lays there.

"Snakes on a Plane", "Blood and Chocolate"........ "Cowboys & Aliens".
What's up with these horrible titles? Not only does this movie have a horrible title, but a horrible premise as well. I get it & even Jon Favreau said it himself -- he wants to merge two different genres that are entertaining into one... but isn't the Western genre and sci-fi contradict each other? I onno, but anyways, despite all the cringing preconceived thoughts about the movie, "Cowboys & Aliens" surprised me with its short but engaging introduction. I've always liked Daniel Craig; he carries a subtle but extremely effective quality that is behind his performance and does the same here. But after the intro, everything falls apart. Action is all over the place in terms of structure, and the plot's engaging quality is all banked on "mystery" which is revealed about 40 minutes in. It's an average movie though the moral that lies underneath all the action and absurdity is pure and quite a treat when discovered.

What a dissapointment. That's it.

Cast: Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford, Olivia Wilde, Sam Rockwell, Paul Dano, Noah Ringer, Keith Carradine, Adam Beach, Clancy Brown

Director: Jon Favreau

Summary: Scott Mitchell Rosenberg's graphic novel series leaps to the screen as amnesiac gunslinger Jake Lonergan (Daniel Craig) stumbles into the Wild West town of Absolution, where he's confronted by potent enemy Col. Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford) and a terrifying problem: invading aliens. Aided by the lovely Ella (Olivia Wilde), Jake rallies a posse of the townspeople, Dolarhyde's minions and local Apache warriors to fight off the extraterrestrial threat.

My Thoughts: "The cast is good but some were lacking in their acting. Olivia Wilde was nothing but eye candy in this film. She brought no life to her character and is forgettable. I just didn't see the point of her in the film. I liked Sam Rockwell as 'Doc', I thought he was a standout character. Daniel Craig seems to repeat the "I don't know", line a lot and is just too broody. Harrison Ford is great as always. It was just a film that I thought could have been so great but just turned into OK. I thought the concept was really interesting and I was intrigued to see how the battle between cowboys and aliens would fare out, but it just felt like it was missing something. I did enjoy the humor in the film and some of the character's. The aliens were creepy enough. But still there is something missing and I can't figure what it is but I'm leaning towards the story. It has some holes in it and some unnecessary character's. But besides it's flaws, it is still worth seeing at least once."

When I first heard about this film I immediately thought of my childhood and to those school lunch-break conversations I had with my mates, 'Who would win in a fight between Optimus Prime and He-man'?. If I'm being completely honest, we're still having those conversations now, they still get heated and someone generally get upset in the end. The prospect of having Cowboys vs. Aliens was music to our ears, finally Hollywood was listening, a mainstream B-Movie staring James Bond and Indiana Jones (another great 'Who would win in a fight between' lunch-break debate of the 1980s). It got slated though, I've read nothing but bad reviews of it but then after watching it, I'm still not sure why. It's first and foremost, a decent Western - and then it's a good sci-fi film. I suppose you either think the concept is silly or you think it's cool - if you think it's silly, you're never going to like it. Ok, so it could have been better, it should have been the coolest film ever but it was still pretty cool. The 10 year old kid in me loved it and the 30 something in me agreed. Now that Hollywood is finally on my wavelength, could we please now have Mr T vs. Jaws (James Bond Jaws, not the shark)? Maybe Care Bears vs. Gummy Bears for the girls?

I expected action/special effects popcorn munching fun, but Cowboys and Aliens is one of the most disappointing let downs in recent memory. With all the right elements and $$ to make a terrific piece of entertainment, Director Jon Favreau and the whole Spielberg led team blows almost all their advantages to make something weak and unsatisfying. Why?

1. 90% Cowboys, 10% Aliens: The cowboy story is set up with stock characters with some interesting conflicts. It has all the visual and musical hallmarks of a classic Western in the Magnificent 7 style. It also has a dream cast who all turn in good performances, including Harrison Ford, Daniel Craig, Paul Dano (There Will Be Blood), Adam Beach and the stunning Olivia Wilde. BUT The aliens are character-less special effects, who pop in towards the end of the picture, with no personality - adding no intrigue in the plot. The reasons for the abductions were unclear to me, since the Aliens were supposedly after gold. Maybe I wasn't paying attention.

2. Dull aliens: ... yet, when the aliens appear, it's blah and done with NO imagination. They look like early drafts of the monsters from the ALIEN franchise, but are not as scary, mysterious or interesting. Ditto for their spaceships and equipment.

3. Ball dropped on storytelling: The committee of credited writers (never a good omen) have managed to create potentially interesting relationship ideas and don't pay any of them off.

i.e. A: Powerful rich dude Harrison Ford has a degenerate son, Paul Dano who torments the town and gets away with it. He gets abducted by Aliens, turns nicer and the ball is dropped. Ford has a real father and son relationship with the young native man he has saved (Beach). It's established and the ball is dropped, we never hear about it again.

i.e. B: Amnesiac bandit Daniel Craig has flashbacks about a wife who he loved that was abducted by those dull aliens. We never find out where she is and what that even means. Then, he also has a budding relationship with mysterious Oliva Wilde (spoiler alert) who is actually another type of nice Alien in a beautiful girl costume who has been abducted by the evil aliens. After some form of 'sexual sparks' she blows herself up to save the humans and the story ends. Huh?

4. No chemistry, OR no opportunity to have any: Ford and Craig, a potential dream buddy team, have barely any chance to interact with each other. No - the filmmakers need the time to trot out more lifeless Alien CGI effects! Craig and Wilde have no chance to make it, and the story ends confusingly just as the romance could have been blossoming.

This film has enough diverting stuff to look at that you might enjoy it on a long plane trip where you don't notice all the stuff that's missing, because you fell asleep on the paper pillow. Or a house party watching someone's new state of the art home theater where everyone is chatting and drunk. However, it's amazing so many smart film people with money to throw at the screen could have overlooked all my above comments and produced such a dud.

The germ of a good idea is present in this film but the execution of that thought is totally mishandled. Murky and dull with characters you know nothing about and care for even less it is easy to see why this tanked worldwide. When did Hollywood forget that to engage the audience you have to have people to care about and root for? It's obvious a lot of money was spent on the effects but it was wasted on what ended up being shiny junk.

I must admit that when I first heard about Cowboys & Aliens and saw bits of the trailer and TV spots, I was scratching my head. I didn't know what to make of it being that it had such a blatant and cheesy title. Fortunately, the film itself turns out to be much better than its title. It stars Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford, with smaller parts for Olivia Wilde and Sam Rockwell and is directed by Jon Favreau. I really appreciate this kind of movie. Tonally, the movie is pure western, and once the sci-fi elements kick in, it's still a western. It's a bit of a genre bender, but it's suprisingly really well-made. It features lots of big canvas shots of areas in (I'm assuming) Montana and Arizona, ala John Ford, so the movie looks very authentic with actual landscapes and real backgrounds. The CGI is used to enhance the sci-fi elements and it all blends perfectly together. All of the real world elements are practical and the alien elements are computer generated, which makes perfect sense to me. The movie also has a lot of good character development and some nice surprises story-wise, as well as not being afraid to go dark. The final scene of the movie is a bit off to me and some of the CGI can be a bit jarring in a few areas, but overall, it's a good looking western/sci-fi film, and I'm happy to be eating my words about how good it could be. You should definitely check out.

For the setting of this epic genre mashup, the time is 1873, and the place is the Arizona Territory. The story begins as an outlaw wakes up to discover he has amnesia, is injured, and has an odd device shackled around one of his wrists. The man makes his way to the town of Absolution (I love that name) where things go from bad (it is revealed he is a wanted outlaw named Jake Lonergan) to worse when the town comes under attack by extra-terrestrials. From there, Jake begins his quest to recover his memory as well as aiding the townspeople in their fight to survive this otherworldly threat.

Based on the title and the concept, it's clear that this film could have easily run the risk of being absolute campy, silly, schlock. Thankfully though, this is not the case, and the film is more or less a classic style western that just happens to have aliens in it. I loved that they play it pretty straight, and it is quite fun and novel to see cowboys duking it out with aliens, especially since the characters have fairly realistic reactions to the situation given the context, which is vital to the film escaping the schlock route.

When the film is purely a western though, that's where it is at its best. Take away the aliens, and this would still be a top-notch badass genre film. Blending genres makes it more unique, but genre mashups are extremely hard to pull off, and pull off well. This film is mostly pretty successful, though some major plot twists sorta took me out of things and were a tad hard to swallow (even with a concept like this). They don't wreck the film, but it does end up becoming a major case of telling instead of showing, which is unfortunate because it would have been awesome to see the characters forced to figure things out without being told straight up. Still though, this film is pretty damn enjoyable, even if somewhat lopsided.

Favreau is a smart man, so he knew he'd need a powerhouse cast to bring the story to life, and the casting choices don't disappointment. Daniel Craig, despite an unfortunate struggle with the accent, is a stone cold bad ass as Lonergan. It's basically his take on James Bond, but with a cowboy hat, and it works quite well. As the wealthy cattle rancher who reigns supreme in Absolution, Harrison Ford proves he's still got it when it comes to being a rough, tough authority figure, and watching him and Craig interact is a real treat. Olivia Wilde is solidly decent as the mysterious Ella who plays a crucial role in helping Jake regain his memory. Various other supporting roles are rounded out by the likes of Sam Rockwell, Paul Dano, Clancy Brown, Adam Beach, Noah Ringer, and John Carradine, all of whom do nice jobs as well.

Even though the sci-fi elements are a little underwhelming, they blend far better with the western material than I thought they might, making for a fairly satisfying genre mashup that's a lot of fun. Give this one a shot.

A decent western, up there with some of the better ones. Once you add the aliens though it went a bit down hill. Great if you like no brainer action blockbusters, which is the category this fall's into more, but I felt with the production and good cast this could have been way better. The SFX are pretty good on the whole, not a fan of the alien creature design though. Overall a good fun film, full of action and a fine cast.....just a slightly silly story line.

This was an interesting concept, but it sure feel short. It is not a BAD way to kill a couple of hours when bored.