COWBOYS AND ALIENS

JANUARY SALE

Starring Daniel Craig

Trailer

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  Hollywood is a god-damn mess and has no idea of what it’s doing, but it sure as hell knows why. Cowboys and Aliens is a forgettable slice of scum that exemplifies all that’s going wrong with the backroom boys of the starlit city, a churning maelstrom of desperate decisions and trends; it’s based on an obscure comic book, which is ‘hot right now’ in the minds of executives (RED, Wanted, uh…. Dylan Dog…), so there’s the geeks catered for. It’s an action movie, so it stars Daniel Craig, possibly the most recognizable action man on the planet now that Matt Damon’s been locked in Clint Eastwood’s loft conversion. It has Olivia Wilde, with her weird cat face, playing much the same mysterious cipher that she did in that balls Tron thing a couple of months ago. And to top it all off, it’s trying to nick some of Star Wars’ old school lustre by taping a rickety Harrison Ford to a horse and having him scowl at aliens that aren’t really there.

  This isn’t Star Wars, for two reasons; one, Star Wars is fun, and two, it wasn’t focus-grouped, it was just MADE. As little as the actors try the fault here really lies with the suits patching bits of commercial interest together; in line with all the superhero films of recent years it tries to be a serious, grim look at loss and family and stuff in the face of overwhelming odds, with all the wit, ingenuity and interesting curveballs that that fails to imply. The aliens are the usual CGI screeching toss-banks with no real motivation, whilst the attempts at emotion are cackhandedly shanghaied by the characters having no character. And then there’s that title. The film wants to be serious, it wants to ‘real’ and ‘believable’, because that’s what Hollywood thinks the audience wants. But it’s called ‘Cowboys and Aliens’ because Hollywood also thinks you’re a fucking idiot, and you won’t understand a title like ‘Creatures From The Planet Golddigger’ or ‘Graphic Novel Adaptation 258’ or ‘Aliens and Cowboys.’ Watch it. What was Daniel Craig’s character’s name? What was it? Who was he? Why? What was Shia LeBouf’s name in Transformers? Car guy? Tit-searcher? Boy?

  We got the next level of entertaining films two years ago, and nobody watched it, and now it’s the future and we’re all chewing cud.