Cowboys and Aliens, the Prequel

Sorry folks. Cowboys and Aliens just didn’t do it for me. The reviews I read were promisng, and I wanted to believe, but there were too many things going on that didn’t make sense. One reviewer said we’re past the idea of aliens as strictly evil. Maybe that’s part of the problem. These aliens are grotesquely ugly in a conventional reptilian way and apparently motivated pretty much by greed, which is a one-dimensional moral lesson in the tradition of the Western for human observers, but maybe that’s one of those simplistic portrayals we’re past. An intriguing thing about District 9, for instance, is the hint that the aliens are more complex than humans give them credit for.

No danger of that here. There is a good alien, the mission-focused Ella, but only in the form of an attractive human female, another convention of the Western, portraying heroic characters as attractive Anglo-Europeans regardless of nominal ethnicity or nationality, but not necessarily all that admirable of a convention of the Western. There is actually a disturbing lack of diversity in the characters. What ethnic diversity is involved is highly anglicized. Westerns weren’t renowned for acknowledging diversity, but they were also part of an anglo-supremacy that is another not-so-admirable convention.

Aside from diversity issues, however, the film suffers from some severe lapses of logic and tortured attempts to resolve contradictions that simply don’t fly. The aliens lasso humans, keep them in a kind of hypnotized storage to collect any belongings or parts that might involve gold, and eventually perform invasive procedures on them for reasons that aren’t entirely clear. Meanwhile, they carry on subterranean mining for the same stuff. What they want it for, we don’t exactly know. Ella says it’s as rare for them as humans, but whether they use it for intergalactic jet fuel, cancer treatment, or money isn’t explained. Presumably we’re left to assume the aliens are just greedy top-gun types that underestimate the power of people to unite and prevail against overwhelming odds. I don’t know if that’s a convention of Westerns or not. I sort of have a recollection of the odds being bad but not insurmountable. The biggest obstacle is often personal inadequacy. There are attempts at that, but they are so superficial that they are almost humorous, as when the cattle baron and the Indian Chief have to reconcile their mutual suspicion of each other.

That however is not necessarily a critical failure. They got the two-fisted mysterious stranger right, but the past he’s running from is a conglomeration of law, injustice, and bad behavior. He stole money and double-crossed his friends for the sake of the girl who ends up fried by the aliens as a consequence, when Jake and his squeeze are abducted for the gold. By pluck and luck he escapes and picks up an alien wrist-gun in the process, but has no recollection of who he was or what happened prior to the abduction. Now he’s on everybody’s list and he doesn’t know why. It works up to the point where we start to find out what happened, but by the time the story is all out, it’s like okay, whatever. The entire last half of the movie is anti-climax with a sort of frenetic, Jar-Jar Binks, Star-Wars feel to it. They lost me when the posse formed up because I couldn’t understand what good these guys were going to be, but maybe that’s the point somehow.

Yeah, they got the conventions of Westerns, every one of them, ruthless bad guys, the cavalry galloping in, courageous coming of age, pacifist learns to stand up for self, etc. etc., but they missed the context. The real failure here is the failure to recognize that westerns had conventions, but every classic Western also had a unique take on the characters and a variation on the narrative that involved more than replacing the bad guys with strictly one-dimensional conventions from another genre. As hard as it is to believe, westerns like Stagecoach, High Noon, even True Grit were about individual characters in the bigger events of westward expansion. Indians, bandits, rustlers, or ruthless cattle barons are portrayed as conventional bad guys, but they function in a context of territorial conflicts that are the consequence of people struggling to mark their own space and define their own identity. Those are motivations we may not sympathize with, but we can appreciate in an intuitive way. We understand something of the psychology that produces the conflicts. Aliens whose only motivation is gold? Not so much. They’re just not really very interesting. They could give a five-year old nightmares, but so can I. They look like every evil alien since Alien, and they don’t even have reproduction at stake. They’re just mean.

Aliens trying to survive I can appreciate in an adversarial way because I can personalize somebody trying to survive, us or them. Aliens collecting gold I just don’t really care about very much because I find it hard to attribute such one-dimensional motivation to an entire race (another problem of diversity?). Greed is one thing. An entire race of greed-charged aliens that doesn’t even go through some kind of introspection is something else. The whole thing screams “VIDEO GAME” in the voice of a production marketer. Like it or not, the classic Westerns, even the bad ones, are more complex. That doesn’t mean the movie won’t be successful, just that it does not acknowledge the fundamental context of Westerns. If it hadn’t been for Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford and one of the best space craft destruction sequences since Challenger, it could have been a ridiculous mess. I can hardly wait for the sequel, Cowboys and Zombies. At least zombies don’t have to account for any expectations of personality. Oh wait, it’s already been done? That will be an instructive take.