Cowboys & Aliens

If absolutely nothing else, Cowboys & Aliens has two things going for it: a title that accurately describes the plot, and a title that sounds stupid enough to make many people not want to watch this movie.  Take heed with this movie title; if you don't want to watch a movie about cowboys fighting aliens, then this is not the film for you.  I, however, happen to generally enjoy Jon Favreau and Daniel Craig, and I keep hoping for Harrison Ford to make up for the last Indiana Jones movie, so I opted to watch this sci-fi/western mash-up.

A man (Daniel Craig) wakes up in the desert, wounded and alone, with no memory of himself or how he got there.  All he knows is that he has a weird thing clamped to his left wrist.  Oh, and he remembers that he's a bad-ass, because he kills the hell out of a trio of bounty hunters.  Our man with no name finds a name (Jake, as it turns out) when he moseys on over to the nearest town, Absolution.  The town is a washed-up mining spot that never had much luck with mining.  The town is still kicking only because old man Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford) uses it as a base for his cattle operation.  This tends to put him and his men --- especially his spoiled rotten and frequently drunken son, Percy (Paul Dano) --- above the law.  Well, Jake publicly humiliates Percy while Percy attempts to publicly humiliate the local saloon owner (Sam Rockwell), which leads to Percy accidentally shooting a deputy.  Percy gets locked up, ready to be sent to the big city to be arraigned.  Jake is also locked up for apparently being a bad, bad man, even if he doesn't remember any of it.  When Dolarhyde hears about Percy's arrest and Jake being in town, he rushes home to confront the sheriff.  A surprisingly interesting battle of wills commences, until aliens happen.

Two plausible reactions to aliens happening

Yep, the titular aliens appear in flying machines, blow some stuff up, kidnap random people, and kill anybody who gets in their way.  This would make modern men scramble, much less someone from the 1870s.  I mean, it would make most men scramble, unless they happen to be Harrison Ford and Daniel Craig.

To broaden the appeal of this film, assless chaps were seriously considered.

Jake's arm clamp/bracelet comes to life around the aliens, and it is a weapon.  Not some wimpy weapon, either; he manages to shoot down one of their ships.  What happens next?  Not surprisingly, everybody teams up to take on the "demons" that have ravaged the town and taken their people.

The acting in this movie is a lot better than it deserves to be.  After all, this is a genre mash-up that, logically, shouldn't work.  It's surprisingly fun, though.  Daniel Craig does his scowling bad-ass thing again; I would have liked to see him show off a little more of his charm, but this is a movie about cowboys fighting aliens, so I guess deep characters are probably not on the menu.  I didn't love Harrison Ford in this movie, but I didn't hate him, either.  In the beginning, he does a pretty good job of playing a bastard, but his performance was missing a crucial extra bit to make it awesome; later, his character softens and falls back into Ford's more comfortable likeable-but-kind-of-gruff territory.  I would have liked to see him enjoy his mean moments more, though.  At least his hat wasn't too reminiscent of Indiana Jones, right?

Are they rebooting the City Slickers franchise?

Sam Rockwell has a bit part in the film, which I was happy to see.  It's not very impressive, though; he plays a weenie.  Adam Beach plays Dolarhyde's semi-adopted son/trusted cowhand and he plays it with as much intensity as you might expect from him; I really wish Beach wasn't the preeminent Native American actor in Hollywood, because his range shows its limits whenever he is asked to do anything more than read lines.  Here, he succeeds in keeping any charisma from accidentally getting on-screen by having his character's most emotional moment (him convincing an Apache chief to follow Dolarhyde) translated by another character.  Walton Goggins was fairly entertaining as a none-too-bright thief, which is just another notch in his belt of unsavory characters.  Keith Carradine was okay as the sheriff, but nothing special.  Similarly, Noah Ringer did a decent job of making googly eyes and looking scared, but his performance was not revelatory.  I did like Clancy Brown's character; for some reason, he seems less evil as he gets older.  I also thought that Paul Dano did a good job as Dolarhyde's insufferable son, who gets hurt just often enough to keep him from getting annoying.  You might also recognize Scottish character actor David O'Hara as Jake's gang-leading nemesis; he's a solid actor that looks mean for a few minutes and then usually dies like he does here.  My biggest problem with the cast was actually with Olivia Wilde as a beautiful stranger.  That's weird, since the kid from The Last Airbender is in this movie, right?  Well, she was okay, I guess, but her flawless complexion, clean hair, and super-white teeth didn't make her the most believable single lady in the Wild West.  I also find it interesting that no men hit on her in this entire film.  I don't ask for a whole lot of realism in my cowboys vs. aliens movies, but she stuck out like a sore thumb.

Where do you get your eyebrows done in a one-horse town?

This is Jon Favreau's  first directorial effort after making blockbusters Iron Man 1 & 2.  How did it turn out?  Well, I have to admit that Favreau could definitely make a good, old fashioned Western if he wanted to.  I was shocked at how engaging I found the alien-free Western scenes.  As for the movie as a whole, well...it's kind of silly.  Luckily, the title clued me in on that possibility, so I wasn't surprised.  I thought the action scenes were pretty good (seeing horses flying in the air is oddly amusing) and I liked how he handled the main actors and characters.  It did seem a little piecemeal, though.  Sure, that makes sense, since you are shoe-horning aliens into a Western, but a lot of the characters felt like they were simply tacked on (the Apaches, the thieves, Adam Beach, etc.) and didn't feel like organic parts of this story.  Favreau made the very best alien/cowboy movie possible, but there was a lot going on in a film that would have benefited from simplicity.  Hell, this might have been a better movie without the aliens.

Overall, Cowboys & Aliens manages to succeed more than a movie of this type (or name) should.  It is an entertaining blend of sci-fi and Westerns, where tough actors get to act tough and we see lots and lots of people get killed by aliens.  Seriously, it seems like a hundred people die, and yet there always appears to be about a dozen or so survivors.  I wouldn't call this a great movie or an unequivocal success, but it is fun and I always like seeing a quality Western, even if it is just in the first fifteen minutes of the movie.  I was hoping for greatness, though, and this film falls a little short --- primarily because the alien plot trampled over the cooler tough guy Western story.  Whatever.  I saw cowboys, I saw aliens, and I saw lots die on both sides.  The movie lived up to its title, at the very least.

Windtalkers

Loud explosions, pyrotechnics, and bodies flying through the air come naturally to the modern war movie, even to the point that sheer devastation is no longer an effective selling point.  These movies need their own angle in order to avoid being seen as lame Saving Private Ryan copycats.  The hook for Windtalkers is the relatively unknown tale of the Navajo tribesmen that joined the army to act as code talkers in the Pacific side of World War II.  That actually sounds like an interesting premise; so many war movies go boom, while very few spend the time to think.  Sending and breaking codes sounds fairly cerebral, right?

Ooh...but John Woo directed this movie.  And he teamed up with Nicolas Cage as the lead actor and Christian Slater as an important supporting character.  So...the main character isn't Navajo, despite the hook for this movie being about the Navajo code talkers.  Great.  I will give credit where it's due; at least they didn't pull a Touch of Evil and give the lead actor an unconvincing ethnic makeover.  Well, if the story is not centering on a Navajo character, what is the story?

Joe Enders (Cage) begins the movie by holding his platoon's position on Guadalcanal at all costs, which means everyone died except him; he was injured, losing hearing in one ear, which also occasionally hurts his balance.  He recovers in a hospital, thanks in part to a nurse (Frances O'Connor) that is clearly attracted to him, despite the fact that he is played by Nic Cage in his "brooding" mode.  Enders gets a promotion and a new assignment as soon as he is well; his new assignment is to protect Ben Yahzee (Adam Beach), one of the new Navajo code talkers.  Ox Anderson (Slater) receives a similar assignment, protecting Charlie Whitehorse.  The Navajo language is an unwritten one and is almost incomprehensible, even within its own language family, which makes it especially hard for enemies to translate; these code talkers were bilingual Navajo that transmitted important messages without the risk of being understood by the enemy.  If the Japanese managed to ever understand the Navajo language, though, the American forces would be in trouble.  Therefore, both Enders and Anderson are told that they must protect the code at all costs; their code talkers must die before being taken captive by the enemy.

That's pretty much the story basics, but there's plenty of stock subplots.  You've got the predictable awkward assimilation into the unit by the Navajo.  They are seen as savages at first, but their impossibly calm demeanor and passivity earn the respect of their squadmates and their practices become more acceptable over time.  Of course, there's one guy (Noah Emmerich) in the squad that is racist; of course, his life is eventually saved by a Navajo.  There's the nervous soldier (Mark Ruffalo) and the guy with the cool weapon (Brian Van Holt).  There's the commanding officer (Peter Stormare) that needs things done, no matter the cost.  There's the inevitable split between the two parallel plot lines; you know either Anderson or Enders will eventually have to kill a Navajo to protect the code.  Who will it be, the nice Anderson, or the bad-ass Enders?

This movie should have been so much better.  Obviously, the big problem is the story.  Why make a movie about the Navajo code talkers, if they are not the main characters?  I'm not crazy about Adam Beach as an actor, but using him as the POV character would have been much better.  Instead, we have a tortured white soldier to identify with.  Even better, it's Nicolas Cage in full-on inappropriate overacting mode.  Ignoring the poor choice of main character, this movie still has major problems.  Are you telling me that the Marines put two extremely valuable code talkers in the same squad, facing immediate danger?  There were only about two hundred of these guys in the war.  I'm pretty sure they would have been better suited for sending messages from wherever the local base was.  This movie barely even uses them for sending or receiving codes; they spend most of their time giving uncoded coordinates for air support.  That's really stupid.  What, are the Japanese (who are shown listening to the radio transmissions) going to hear their own coordinates and assume that whatever is coming their way is good?  Maybe the Americans are bringing them ice cream!  Stupid.  And how many Japanese die in this movie?  This is the Pacific war, where they were dug in and well-protected.  The Americans just run up the side of mountains, and yet I'd estimate that the dead Japanese outnumbered the dead American soldiers by a 4:1 ratio.  That is so far beyond stupid, it's insulting to stupid.

The acting is what you would expect from a John Woo movie.  It's barely there.  Nicolas Cage gets to make funny faces when he's in battle and sulk when he's not.  I'm sorry to say that he actually showed the most range in this movie.  Christian Slater, Peter Stormare, Mark Ruffalo, and Brian Van Holt were all one-dimensional caricatures of 1940s soldiers.  Noah Emmerich got to be the racist jerk that sees the error in his ways (well, he learns to accept one Navajo, anyway), but the character is so boring and predictable that you still don't care.  Adam Beach was a little better, but his character had no emotional arc, so there was nothing for him to do in this role.  Whose fault is all this?  Well, you can blame the writers, John Rice and Joe Batteer, because this story sucks, but I'm going to blame John Woo.  As the director and a producer on the film, he had ample opportunity to realize how crappy this script was and have it fixed.  He didn't, so the responsibility for this wreck belongs to him.

This movie doesn't even have the normal perks of a John Woo movie.  The action isn't good.  Woo is best known for his slow-motion, stylized action sequences, where impossible things happen and then explode.  Here, he tries to channel the destructive spirit of the Pacific war and fails.  The big battle scenes try to have a documentary feel to them (a la Saving Private Ryan), but the special effects in these scenes are far worse than any war movie released in 2002 should be.  Some of the smaller-scale battle sequences are fine, but it's not enough to make this movie watchable.

Let's see...bad story, bad acting, and bad action.  Yep.  This is a bad movie.