Indiana Jones and James Bond Fight Aliens. Do You Really Need a Review?
If you’ve had the pleasure of knowing me for more than five minutes or have recently broken into my apartment and taken a look at my DVD collection, you’ll immediately notice that I have a fondness for alien movies. I even like the “bad” alien movies like Skyline (though I didn’t like Super 8 and I’m tired of hearing about it). Maybe I’m just bitter and have a subconscious hatred of the world and love watching it get destroyed by some alien race. I should probably get that checked out.
Anyway, if you follow me at all you’ll know that two of the only movies I actually anticipated this year both involved aliens. The aforementioned Super 8 sucked more balls than a malfunctioning bowling lane but luckily Cowboys and Aliens does a lot better (though admittedly the competition wasn’t exactly fierce). Maybe what drew me to it is its blending of genres; I have shelves full of movies about aliens blowing up Washington D.C. and Los Angeles and New York but how many can you name where they try to fuck up the desert? Who cares about the desert? Even the Arizona Cardinals don’t want to be there considering their record.
Chances are, this screencap is several thousand times more manly than you.
Jon Favreau’s latest attempt to capitalize off his success with Iron Man starts off with James Bond waking up bleary-eyed in the desert and despite having no memory of who he is seems to have absolutely no issue remembering all of his British Secret Service training and takes out some stereotypical outlaw douchebags. He then runs into Indiana Jones who plays a creep for about ten minutes before becoming a hero through some very forced sob stories and Olivia Wilde, who has officially rented out my special dreams for the next few months.
Wouldn’t you know it, a few minutes later a bunch of mini-Cloverfield monsters show up and kidnap half the town for extremely poorly justified reasons. James Bond, Indiana Jones, Olivia “Marry Me” Wilde and a band of stereotypical wild west caricatures take off on a trip to find the aliens while flat out refusing to call the army and carrying barely enough weaponry to take out a steroid-infused bunny. Probably a guy thing. We can be stubborn, sometimes.
There’s a lot of cool scenes in Cowboys and Aliens but it all feels very disjointed; none of them flow together very well whatsoever and every scene is connected by another scene of the group of humans traveling via horseback. And for fuck’s sake some of these scenes drag on forever. There’s one part in particular where Indiana Jones tells a war story to some kid that goes on for about five minutes and contributes absolutely nothing to the overall story arc besides adding a few minutes of running time to the final theatrical release.
I don't often fall in love, but when I do...hopefully Olivia Wilde will be involved
Daniel Craig channels James Bond so much that they might as well have just named him Bames Jond instead of Jake-whatever and Sam Rockwell is as awesome as always as the town doctor who very predictably comes through in the end (though I’ve heard him say “I’m not a child” in so many movies now that I’m beginning to think it’s an in-joke). Olivia Wilde is great eye candy, but unfortunately her role is hurt by a plot twist about halfway through the film that is officially one of the most retarded fucking things I’ve seen in a movie since Radio. I understand that “realism” was thrown out the window the minute aliens started yanking up people in Red Dead Redemption-era America but there’s a part involving her that will bring your suspension of disbelief crashing down like a blind pilot.
Cowboys and Aliens, however, is still pretty good. Especially in the crapfest that’s been 2011 in film. It’s probably the third best movie I’ve seen this year behind Rango and X-Men: First Class but that probably has a lot to do with my love of alien invasion films. There’s just too many problems, most of which revolve around the writing, to really bring it to the top of 2011. For example, why the hell do the aliens need to capture us to “study our weaknesses” when we’re just a few steps above using musket balls and they can fly through fucking space (not to mention that explosive laser beams seem to be enough to kill most people without any further research being needed...)? Why do they insist on not calling the army? How can you say the aliens “are not prepared to defend themselves” when they clearly have no trouble wiping out waves of people? Why don’t the townsfolk pick the wrist-gauntlet weapons off the dead aliens? And why the fuck aren’t they wearing clothes?!
And why doesn't James Bond just use his invisible Aston Martin?!
You know what all these questions mean? It means the writing’s bad. It means that Favreau needed some way to justify all the action scenes (which are cool, by the way) so he chose to ignore some of the most basic issues regarding simple logic. My Asian friend mentioned that it felt like they were just making stuff up as they went along and I must agree that anecdote pretty much sums everything up.
That’s not saying Cowboys and Aliens is bad, though. It’s still fun to watch and I’ll probably add it to my Blu-Ray collection when it comes out in a few months and my download collection when I torrent it in a few weeks, it just suffers from a lot of issues that should’ve been cleaned up. If you’re already into alien movies then it will undoubtedly find its way into your heart, but if you’re not into alien movies then go to hell because you’re obviously a horrible person.