Cowboys vs. Aliens
Sep. 4th, 2011 01:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsLisakit and I went out to see Cowboys and Aliens. This movie qualifies as dumb fun, because the premise and the plot sure don't make any sense.
It's lovely watching Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford in a western, hamming it up as a pair of rough men doing bad things (to each other as well as everyone around them) because they have to, and of course Olivia Wilde is simply the beautiful flavor of the day, big eyes and all. With seven writers, this was "passed from writer to writer in a desperate attempt to save it!" but it is, really, only saved by the cast, which knows exactly where to turn their acting dials, and the director, Jon Farveau, who knows how to blow up things real good.
The aliens are, in a word, stupidly evil. Ripped from every bad source you can imagine, they're a mash-up of Aliens, Predator, Prey, Independence Day, Doom, and goodness only knows what else. They're vicious and nasty beasts who prefer hand-to-hand combat to actually, you know, just shooting the stupid humans, because it's fun, even if a few of them get killed in the process. Despite all their high-tech-ness, they don't even have a decent sensor net around their starship. That kind of stupidly evil.
But, really, you don't go for the aliens to make sense. You go to watch things blow up good.
There are also Indians in this film. They make up half the assault force that takes on the aliens in the final battle. But you'd never know that from the press, would you? Typically, the minorities get short shrift in a film like this, but at least there are a few different redemptions stories being told here, many of them about racial reconciliation, which is sorta necessary in our modern world.
Dumb fun, but that's all it was.
It's lovely watching Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford in a western, hamming it up as a pair of rough men doing bad things (to each other as well as everyone around them) because they have to, and of course Olivia Wilde is simply the beautiful flavor of the day, big eyes and all. With seven writers, this was "passed from writer to writer in a desperate attempt to save it!" but it is, really, only saved by the cast, which knows exactly where to turn their acting dials, and the director, Jon Farveau, who knows how to blow up things real good.
The aliens are, in a word, stupidly evil. Ripped from every bad source you can imagine, they're a mash-up of Aliens, Predator, Prey, Independence Day, Doom, and goodness only knows what else. They're vicious and nasty beasts who prefer hand-to-hand combat to actually, you know, just shooting the stupid humans, because it's fun, even if a few of them get killed in the process. Despite all their high-tech-ness, they don't even have a decent sensor net around their starship. That kind of stupidly evil.
But, really, you don't go for the aliens to make sense. You go to watch things blow up good.
There are also Indians in this film. They make up half the assault force that takes on the aliens in the final battle. But you'd never know that from the press, would you? Typically, the minorities get short shrift in a film like this, but at least there are a few different redemptions stories being told here, many of them about racial reconciliation, which is sorta necessary in our modern world.
Dumb fun, but that's all it was.
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Date: 2011-09-05 03:57 am (UTC)I swear I could actually see Harrison Ford counting the days until he got to go back to picking up stranded hikers in his helicopter (http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/story?id=103722&page=1).
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Date: 2011-09-05 03:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-06 08:55 am (UTC)"Let's take every bad cliche that we can dredge up from the bottom of the filthy sewer we refer to as the creative pool of Hollywood, and make a movie out of it!"
As for who saved this movie... well, I haven't watched it, but it's pretty much saved purely by the will of the producers, I think.