Cowboys & Aliens

Genre mixing and versus battles are all the rage these days. Pirates vs. ninjas, zombies vs. anything and now Cowboys vs. Aliens.

There REALLY isn't a lot to say about this film - it's very much a case of "does exactly what it says on the tin". You've got the Wild West setting with cowboys and injuns and then - BOOM! ALIENS!

Daniel Craig - with plot convenient/lazy writing amnesia and a bracelet that fires lasers - and Harrison Ford are the driving forces here but there's no real characterisation. Harrison Ford is a gruff cattle rancher with a pissant son (who gets abducted) and about all his character does is say that he looks at a native American guy is like his REAL son. Daniel Craig is suffering movie grade amnesia and is plagued with a severe case of flashbacks... it's nothing that hasn't been done a hundred times before and as always, it's just a case of the writer either not having the talent or inclination to write something better. He's a bad ass with a criminal past - that he can't remember - and the only weapon that works against the aliens.

After the aliens have abducted a bunch of people from the town, Indiana Jones and James Bond get a posse together and head out to find the aliens and that's really the meat of the film. We find out that the aliens are there FOR GOLD... which... doesn't really make a lot of sense. If you're capable of interstellar travel and can detect gold from orbit... why the hell do you want to waste all the time and energy of going down into a gravity well as big as Earth? Just go asteroid mining! And if you're thinking "aliens coming to Earth for our gold... that sounds familiar!" that'll be because it was the plot for the cinematic masterpiece known as Battlefield: Earth.

Also, the reason for the abductions is apparently because the aliens want to find out our weaknesses. This kind of thing always strikes me as silly. Unless you're going to develop biological agents SPECIFICALLY for humans, it really shouldn't be that hard to work out that humans are incredibly frail. We're meatbags that can die by falling down a flight of stairs - it's not like we're Kryptonians or Terminators, we die REAL easy. There is the insinuation that the aliens will also descend en masse to wipe humanity out - there's no explanation given, that's apparently just how these aliens roll.

So, naturally after following a wounded alien, they manage to find their ship and decide to engage in what might as well have been dubbed "operation suicide", which is basically most of the people riding around outside the ship and getting massacred by the nigh invulnerable aliens, that are apparently capable of just ripping people apart... all of this after they recognise that they want to keep to the high ground.

Naturally though, main characters are immune and Han Solo and James Bond are fine, aliens are killed and that's about it. Very average.

It almost feels as though Casino Royale should be called "How James Bond Got His Groove Back". It's fair to say that previous Bond movies were always a campy affair, even if they didn't mean to be... this being taken to the illogical extreme in Die Another Day, where we had an invisible car - which really seemed to be taking it all a bit too far.

It's a shame really, Pierce Brosnan was a good Bond... he had the misfortune of being a good Bond in bad films. With the exception of Golden Eye, they all had a distinctly hacked together feel... which is presumably the result of the rewrites that were going on DURING FILMING.

While expressions like "reboot" are to be treated with trepidation but it seems as if Casino Royale was actually what the franchise needed. It would have been difficult for the series to continue to top itself in over-the-top action set pieces anyway and the gadgets were just getting stupid. What was next? The intangible car? Anyway, we seem to have left all that far behind and Daniel Craig is far more in line with Flemming's Bond, much colder and far less inclined to quip camply after having destroyed an army with his nuclear powered pistol.

It's really not like any of the Bond films. Things are all kept far more realistic... naturally, there are still some of the classic Hollywood clichés that bend the laws of physics - the recoiless, totally suppressed infinite clip SMGs are still around... and people can jump improbably distances without any ill effect and houses collapsing into the sea probably isn't a normal occurrence but for casual viewing there aren't any "THAT WOULD NEVER HAPPEN!" moments.

All in all, it's a relief to see that we've managed to avoid the mistakes of the past. The romance aspect was a bit iffy but I suspect that was necessary for a variety of reasons and it never really gets in the way... and it's far more credible than the last half dozen Bond girls...