Harrison Ford as the iron-fisted Colonel Dolarhyde and Daniel Craig as a stranger with no memory of his past in Cowboys & Aliens.
Hollywood sharpies spend endless hours at pitch meetings dreaming up hybrids of famous movies, and sometimes they hit pay dirt. "It's like Jaws, but on a spaceship": Alien. Then the hybrid blossoms into its own format until it devolves and devours its own with Alien vs. Predator and finally collapses, exhausted into the heap of Mega Shark vs. Crocosaurus. That's what happens when moviemakers take Spengler's theory of the rise and decline of nations and use it as a business model.
The title Cowboys & Aliens — suggesting a merger of the cowboys-and-Indians Western genre with science fiction — triggered the salivary glands of some very important film people. As packed as the cast list is with stars (Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford) and vaunted character actors (Sam Rockwell, Keith Carradine, Paul Dano), it's fair to say there's more movie muscle behind the camera. Steven Spielberg, Ron Howard and Brian Grazer are among the producers. The director, Jon Favreau, did Iron Man and Elf. The quintet of writers who receive script credit include guys who had worked on Star Trek, The Proposal, Lost, Alias and the Transformers and Mission: Impossible series. Now all they had to do was dream up a movie that lived up to its title.
The film takes its name from a recent graphic novel, "created" by Scott Mitchell Rosenberg, that imagines an alien race has landed in Arizona in 1873 to mine the gold that is even more precious on their planet than on ours. The story intercuts scenes in the alien camp with those involving a ragtag team of earthlings — hard-bitten cowboys, a tribe of Native Americans and a newly-arrived wagon train of settlers — and pits ray guns against rifles and bows and arrows. Beneath the comic-book sound effects of the weaponry ("SWABAMM!" "TWONG!" "KRAKABOOOOM!"), the book presses the metaphor of Manifest Destiny, with the aliens plundering the West as the white men did the Indians' home land. Like many earlier Westerns, the Cowboys & Aliens novel is a political morality play on horseback.
What's clear is that the filmmakers loved the title, hated the book. Prudently deciding that the white folks in the audience wouldn't enjoy the movie so much if they kept being reminded that their ancestors were guilty of genocide, the writers cobbled a new story with more familiar contours. Now the hero is a nameless bravado (Craig) wandering into the frontier town of Absolution, and helping the locals and some nearby Indians fight off the invaders from another planet. The outpost is stocked with attractive stereotypes: the gruff sheriff (Carradine), the meek saloonkeeper (Rockwell) and his loving Latina wife (Ana de la Reguera), the imperious cattle baron Dolarhyde (Ford), his wastrel son (Dano) and a smart Indian (Adam Beach) he's adopted. Also a preacher (Chris Browning), a pretty girl (Olivia Wilde) and a kid (Noah Ringer) — the whole sagebrush ensemble from Gene Autry or John Ford pictures, reunited for a retro movie with a nine-figure budget.
At first the man with no name and his mysterious alien bracelet suggest a Western remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still: what if the Clint-Eastwoodian stranger who upends a Western town were an extraterrestrial? But it's soon revealed that he is the all-too-human renegade Jake Lonergan, wanted for many a nefarious crime and, more important, ripe for redemption. So are the townspeople, who, like rival members of a platoon, band together to fight the otherworldly intruders. The Absolutionists also need to free their loved ones who've been abducted by the aliens, both for purposes of research and as expression of an intergalactic Bad Neighbor policy.