By Mark HadleyMonday 15 Aug 2011MoviesReading Time: 3 minutes
Rating: M
Distributor: Paramount
Release Date: August 18
The title says it all. In an age where film producers can no longer blithely make entire racial groups the bad guys, someone had to be found to face off against the cowboys.
Thankfully aliens are yet to be represented at the Anti-Discrimination Commission and can be safely sold as universally evil.
Daniel Craig wakes up in the Arizona desert, a battered cowboy with no memory of why he would be lying in the dust without boots and a strange metal device clamped around his wrist. When he’s accosted by wandering bounty hunters, he’s even more surprised to discover that he’s something of a 19th century killing machine. Craig rides into the aptly town of Absolution and almost immediately falls foul of the local despot, Colonel Woodrow Dolarhyde, played by Harrison Ford. In the space of a few action-packed minutes of screen time he discovers he’s a wanted outlaw called Jake Lonergan, his girlfriend has been kidnapped by aliens and his ‘bracelet’ is a powerful energy weapon – which comes in handy when Dolarhyde and Lonergan find themselves at ground zero of an extraterrestrial invasion of the wild west.
Part of me was disappointed when the aliens turned up. Craig and Ford were doing well reviving the western genre. It’s a particularly brave role for Harrison, who finally plays someone close to his own age and a bad guy. The aliens add some real jump-factor to the film but seem to burn through an improbable number of cowboys in the film’s 118 minutes. And for a species capable of interstellar travel, someone should tell them to stop running straight at the guys with the guns. Still, Cowboys & Aliens is a worthy continuation of director Jon Favreau’s growing action line-up that already includes Iron Man and Iron Man 2.
In keeping with the western format, the town of Absolution includes a grisly preacher called Meacham (Clancy Brown), who also happens to be fair hand with a gun. However his spiritual contributions are more at home in the 21st than the 19th century. His underlines humanity’s responsibility for where they spend eternity, telling Lonergan:
“I’ve seen good men do bad things and bad men do good things. If you end up in heaven or hell its not God’s plan it’s your own.”
But God’s plan doesn’t get much of a look in. Meacham tells Sam Rockwell’s frightened character ‘Doc’ that our efforts are what will clinch God’s favour:
“Certainly you don’t expect God to do everything for you, do you? You’ve got to earn his presence, then you’ve got to recognise it, then you’ve got to act on it.”
But no-one is convinced by idea of an eternity to come, and the suggestion that the aliens are demons just demonstrates that religion is something the ignorant hold on to. When Meacham dies, Doc clearly states the present-only creed of the current century over his grave:
Doc: “Lord, if there is such a thing as a soul, this man had a good one. Please protect it. He made me feel good. The world was a better place for him being he. Ashes to ashes, amen. That do it?
Lonergan: “That’ll do.”