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    Cowboys & Aliens

    Movie » Cowboys & Aliens released on July 29, 2011.

    In Silver City, Arizona, Apache Indians and Western settlers must lay their differences aside when an alien spaceship crash lands in their city.

    gc8's Cowboys & Aliens review

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    It's Got... uh... Cowboys AND Aliens.

    There's an old saying in the film biz - good book, bad movie; bad book, good movie.  Whether it's true for comic book movies is debatable, but perhaps when it comes to the non-superhero action/thriller genre, it just might be. Movies like Men in Black, The Road to Perdition, and A History of Violence have certainly eclipsed their comic predecessors in a way no Spider-Man movie ever could. Such is the case with Cowboys & Aliens.
     
    If there's one thing Hollwood understands, it's how to slap together two simple concepts to make a movie - the screenwriter of Innocent Blood once said, 'mobsters + vampires... it's a movie!' So when producer director Jon Favreau was making the rounds at Comic Con promoting Iron Man, he no doubt saw Cowboys & Aliens, by it's cover alone, already had the kind of simplistic genre blending title that even the most obtuse studio execs could understand. And it's probably a good thing that the film got made based on it's title alone, because the original comic (chances are you haven't read it) just wasn't that good.
     
    The Cowboys & Aliens graphic novel, despite wide distribution just wasn't very good - not surprising because according to some sources (q.v. bleedingcool.com) the backers of the film just bribed big comic stores into placing huge orders with Diamond Distribution. Whatever the case, at the height of it's distribution, some comic shops were basically just giving Cowboys & Aliens away for free.
     
    Fortunately, for the movie going public, the film Cowboys & Aliens, aside from the title, has almost no resemblance to the Cowboys & Aliens graphic novel, which was a slapdash story about cowboys and Native Americans uniting to fight a common foe, alien colonialists. Instead the film tells the story of a western outlaw with no memories who had somehow escaped from marauding aliens, and how he has to team up with a ruthless cattle baron and the struggling survivors of a washed up gold mining town to take on a well armed alien menace.
     
    Overall, the film is entertaining, and the performances, particularly by leads Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford, are good. It's not a great film, there are plenty of plot holes, and overall, despite the best efforts of the cast, the characters all come off a bit flat as written. But, to it's credit, the film never really goes off the rails into nothing to see here but big budget special effects territory like so many other calculated-to-be-summer-blockbuster movies (such as the Transformers and Pirates of the Carribean films).
     
    In what is basically an average cowboy film crossed with an average SF film, Cowboys & Aliens delivers just what it promises: cowboys and aliens, nothing more, nothing less. If you can appreciate it solely on those merits, it'll entertain you for about two hours, and then you can forget about it two minutes after you've seen it.

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