There's no reason a movie directed by Jon Favreau called Cowboys & Aliens should be as serious and ultimately as flat as the movie we ultimately have here. Sure it has a terrific cast and there are a lot of respectable folks behind the camera, but ultimately, I'm not sure they knew what to make of the material when it was finally time to shoot this thing.
Most of the problems with Cowboys & Aliens can actually be found with Daniel Craig's character, an amnesiac cowboy in 1870's New Mexico who we gradually learn is named Jake Lonergan. He wakes in the middle of the desert, bloodied, wounded, with a strange mechanical bracelet stuck on his wrist. Right there, you've got a setup that's got my attention. Who is this guy? What happened to him? When are we going to see the bracelet do something cool. And duly, steadily, we get the answers to all of these questions and we get to see the bracelet do stuff, but as a character, Jake never really feels like he's part of it.
Let me clarify: a lot of the action in the script by Transformers scribes Orci and Kurtzman is predicated on the "and then this happened" mode of storytelling, where there's a thing the hero has that may or may not be important to the plot, meanwhile, the bad guys are over here doing their thing and somehow, the two just sort of crash into each other around the end of the movie. Yes, we're given a kind of compelling reason for Jake to go after the aliens near the end of the movie in the guise of a woman he loves who was taken by the aliens, and yes, Craig is duly a badass throughout--he's Daniel Craig. But beyond that, he's such a blank slate that it feels weird trying to invest any kind of feeling in his character.
I think in a better world, Sam Rockwell's greenhorn bartender Doc would have been the main character and Cowboys & Aliens would have been funny. But you review the movie before you and not the movie you wanted to see.
Rockwell is joined by a nicely eclectic cast playing what could broadly be called characters but are really just types who switch from personality type A to personality type B should they happen to be fortunate to survive to the end credits. There's Harrison Ford as Colonel Dolarhyde, the evil-ish cattle baron and Civil War vet, and you can tell he's evil(ish) because there's never been a nice character in the history of fiction with the name "Dolarhyde." Then there's his bully of a son Percy (Paul Dano) and I think the Dolarhyde rule can tell you everything you need to know about his character.
They're joined by a good-hearted preacher (Clancy Brown), Doc (Rockwell), a saloon owner and, well, doctor, who's not so great with a gun, and Olivia Wilde as Ella, the woman who knows things. I can't decide whether Wilde is a terrible actress or simply a victim of simply very bad scripts that don't really have any room for her (you could cut her out of the movie entirely and it wouldn't matter), but between this and Tron: Legacy, I'll be more wary when I see that she's in the cast of something.
But enough picking on the actors--let's pick on Cowboys & Aliens' actual aliens. I actually think the reason they've come to Earth works well enough within the confines of a Western, but beyond that, they're these decently-designed monsters (with the exception of a ridiculous anatomical flaw which has less to do with evolution and more to do with expedient monster-making), but none of them is given any kind of personality or real interaction with the human cast beyond some stalking and killing. So even though the movie has a bad guy, it still feels curiously lacking in an antagonist.
The FX and sound work are purely functional--again, the design of the ships, etc. in the movie seem to the result of expedience with an eye towards "what would be easiest for our heroes to blow up?" A couple of days out and I'm still trying to remember what the aliens and their ship looked like and I just can not do it.
The movie is based on a 2006 comic that, based on its description at least, sounded far more interesting. So again, it's a real shame that any of the more oddball, out there elements had to be smoothed out or removed entirely for this bland mess we ended up with.
Audio and Video
I should give some special notice to the sound here in the film, which travels between the speakers gloriously. There are some truly nice technical elements to the film on this front, and it's one area where the movie excels. The whole thing gets 5.1 DTS audio, which is nice.
While the movie gets a nice presentation on Blu-ray, curiously, some of the special features are in standard def. What's up with that?
Special Features
Detailed below, and most of it's the usual "how did it get made" type of thing, but the most interesting material is the series of conversations between the cast, producers, and writers with director Jon Favreau. While most aren't super revelatory, Harrison Ford's is actually terrific, and he comes off as a little cantankerous but serious. It's clear that he had reservations about coming on to the production (he says he didn't "get" it) and even after recounting the meeting with Favreau where the director attempted to provide a human element to the material, it's clear that Ford simply placed his faith in the director and went with it. I could watch a full hour of these guys talking and would love it.