Reviews

The western might not be dead, but it's certainly on life support. Once a mainstay of cinemas, it faded as a genre two decades before most of us were born.

It might have simply been an inevitable case of fatigue on the part of audiences tired of seeing what were, for the most part, very similar stories. But the western had served as a form of modern fairy tale, a mythology for a country which otherwise possessed very little. All the well-worn tropes were there: mysterious heroes, damsels in distress, villainous... uh... villains. Treasure, adventures, excitement. But then it was supplanted by another type of fairy-tale: sci-fi.

Suddenly, there were adventures featuring all the same characters and scenarios (see Star Wars), but with the addition of exciting new settings and special effects. It was only natural that the western would fade from relevance. It does make occasional re-entries into the pop culture spectrum, of course; a spate of films in the '90s such as Unforgiven and Tombstone, and the more recent 3:10 to Yuma and True Grit. But while well-received, they did not have the same audience appeal the westerns of half a century ago had.

So might marrying a western to the genre that displaced it form a recipe for success? Cowboys and Aliens banks on this. Set in New Mexico in the 1870s, it follows a mysterious outlaw Jake Lonergan (Daniel Craig), who wakes up in the desert alone and with amnesia, a curious metal gauntlet shackled around his wrist. Upon entering a nearby town, he finds himself in a spot of trouble after crossing paths with the dullard son of a local tyrannical rancher, and is imprisoned for past crimes. But just as he's about to be taken off to prison, mysterious flying machines appear in the sky, shooting up the town with what appear to be nightclub lasers and drawing townsfolk up into their hulks. Lonergan manages to ward them off with the mysterious gauntlet on his wrist, and from there, the survivors form a posse to hunt down the unknown attackers and retrieve their lost kin.

It's not the flashy alien tech or presence that sells this film. That sort of thing has been mined to death recently, and Cowboys & Aliens delivers absolutely nothing novel on that front. The creature and vehicle designs, while adequate, instil no sense of wonder. But the western setting is a welcome change, and one wonders whether it might have been a better film had it focused on this more. Craig makes a terrific quiet presence, and Harrison Ford's menacing take as one of the film's human antagonists marks somewhat of a return to form for him. A straight western with the cast probably would never have been made, but when set against the relatively lackluster alien presence, one can't help but wish that it was.