Cowboys & Aliens just a dusty dust-up

What would you do if you woke up in the middle of the desert with no memory of anything and a strange bracelet on your wrist? If you’re the mysterious man with no name in the new movie Cowboys & Aliens, then you should probably expect trouble, because trouble is soon to arrive after you.

Daniel Craig plays the mysterious loner who quickly finds out that he has few friends in Absolution, Ariz. The year is 1873 and personalities in the Old West range from the good and the bad to the downright ugly. He runs afoul of Col. Woodrow Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford), who seems to be the long arm of the law in the small town. Dolarhyde claims that Craig is Jake Lonergan, a gold bandit and an outlaw.

These two dudes have to put their differences aside in order to work together against a common foe. Just as Lonergan is set to be imprisoned, the town is attacked by flying crafts that attack with their advanced weaponry, kidnapping some of the townsfolk at the same time.

You can pretty much guess how it all turns out. This movie may have started off with the same kind of quirky genre-bending veneer like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies but it’s still as formulaic as ever. The fact that there’s a gold mine near the town plays a critical factor in why the aliens have decided to pick a fight there.

Despite the lack of real originality, you can still enjoy a story like this because of who the characters are and how well they are played. Dolarhyde and Lonergan are as stock as stock characters can get. Strong roles for women are hard to come by too, so it’s too bad that Olivia Wilde’s Ella Swenson comes across just as expected: mostly forgettable. Sam Rockwell is underutilized here as well, only showing a smidgen of the fantastic character actor that he is. Someday he will win an Oscar, but it will not be for this role.

There really isn’t much else to say about the whole affair. It had cowboys and it had aliens. There was horse riding and gunfights and alien abductions and experiments on human abductees. There were galloping chase sequences and fistfights and showdowns and all that too, in between the laser attacks and creepy weird extraterrestrials wreaking havoc across the countryside. I didn’t really expect the aliens to use ropes to snag their catches, but apart from that, there were absolutely no surprises in Absolution.