Demons took your gold.

Cowboys and Aliens

(2011)

Watchable enough, if overstretched and lacking a strong-enough narrative drive. It's also short on humour and lacks decently realised aliens. I'm sounding like it's a bit duff, aren't I?

Jon Favreau delivers solid western trappings, and the leads are good value (Craig, Ford, Rockwell, Dano) but the script never finds anywhere interesting to go despite the gaudy premise. Craig's man with no memory finds a metal bracelet on his wrist and learns that he might be a bit of a bastard. And after some altercations (mostly involving an irritating Dano) he sets off with a posse to find the aliens.

The alien craft look like cheap gliders, the aliens look like green CGI any-aliens; as is often the case close ups do them more favours as movement looks artificial. They're pretty much interchangeable with any CGI crap we've seen lately (Super 8's alien for example). And their skills and strengths seem to vary according to the requirements of the scene they're in. All the promise that District 9's photo real prawns gave us is dashed.

The western trappings too often translate as scriptwriting by committee (Ford's gruff colonel has to show his soft side, the distrustful pow-wow with the American Indians leads to mutual respect in the heat of battle). So it's okay, but at no point did I feel that if I'd left the cinema before the end I'd be missing out on something good.

***

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