COWBOYS & ALIENS: We Got a Kid and a Dog – Why Not a Woman?

Cowboys and Aliens (2011) – Directed by Jon Favreau – Starring Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford, Olivia Wilde, Sam Rockwell, Clancy Brown, Keith Carradine, Adam Beach, Abigail Spencer, Noah Ringer, Paul Dano, and Walton Goggins.

Cowboys. Aliens. James Bond. Han Solo. Thirteen. Zaphod Beeblebrox. The Kurgan. Wild Bill Hickock. Boyd Crowder. In a film by the guy who brought you Iron Man and Elf. Obviously, COWBOYS & ALIENS is going to be a movie best described as …

Tedious.

Joyless.

A chore to watch.

COWBOYS & ALIENS is not a horrible movie but it is utterly disappointing in its mediocrity. Jon Favreau has become one of my favorite directors over the years, but all of the fun and energy he brought to many of his previous films is completely lacking here. Instead of taking his inspiration from westerns like The Professionals or Sam Raimi’s Quick and the Dead, Favreau seems to want to make something like The Man with No Name But with Aliens.

The question I have is, Why?

Daniel Craig spends the movie scowling. Harrison Ford spends the movie growling. Olivia Wilde spends the movie looking concerned. Sam Rockwell spends the movie whining. The aliens spend the movie capturing and torturing humans and only one of them has even a blip of a personality. I’ve nothing against a serious western or a serious sci-fi flick, of course, but when you’ve assembled this much talent and you’re spending over $160 million to make a summer film … I don’t know, I’d kind of like to be having a good time. It’s incredibly disappointing because Favreau’s strength is getting the best out of personalities, and here … nothing.

I don’t want to rag too hard on Favreau because, as I said, I think he’s a fantastic director, but he clearly drops the ball with COWBOYS & ALIENS. The story here is solid, but it’s all filmed and paced roboticly. There’s no personality in his direction, no life. It’s seemingly just one “set up a camera and shoot whatever happens” shot after another.

The film starts off rather promisingly, with Jake Lonergan waking up in the desert with no recollection how he got there or who he is. Three men ride up on him and decide to take him in, and Jake completely kicks their ass. He then rides into town and after getting stitched up by the preacher (Clancy Brown), he does the whole “I’m the baddest man alive” routine again, so the film has this really solid, serious vibe to it.

But then the aliens show up and start firing and kidnapping, and we get introduced to our cast of characters that’s going on a rescue mission. Between Jake, Woodrow Dolarhyde (Ford), Ella Swenson (Wilde), Doc (Rockwell), Nat (Adam Beach), Meacham (Brown), and Emmett (Noah Ringer), there’s not a single bit of fun in the bunch. Now, loved ones have just been kidnapped so there’s no real reason for any of these folks to be all Shiny Happy People, but maybe we could have been given someone to lighten the mood. I brought up Richard Brooks’ The Professionals earlier, and that film provides a fine blueprint on how to do a movie like this; despite the seriousness of the situation, Brooks assembles a diverse cast of personalities to play off one another. There’s super serious Lee Marvin, but he’s offset by the charming roguish personality of Burt Lancaster. Here, we’ve got dour Daniel Craig offset by the grumpy Harrison Ford.

Would it kill someone to smile? Just once?

Now, despite all of this, COWBOYS & ALIENS is still an okay movie. There’s always something going on, so while I wasn’t engaged, I wasn’t bored, either. I didn’t hate where the movie was taking me, I just wanted it to be a better ride.

For instance, the group sets off and spends their first night in an upside down riverboat steamship that’s lying in the middle of the desert. It’s pouring rain outside and there’s an alien around. Dolarhyde has a “be a man” talk with Emmett. Meacham has a “be a man” talk with Doc. Jake and Ella chat. Then the alien shows up and you can barely see anything because it’s so dark.

The traveling group meets up with Jake’s old gang, whom he left so he could shack up with a woman he keeps seeing in flashback. She was a whore, which we know because all of Jake’s men say “whore” about 82 times. Jake engineers an escape, but then the alien ships show up again and before you know it, our group is beset by Indians. Then everyone teams up for the raid on the alien ship.

None of this is awful, but I struggled to find something to cling to as I watched the movies. The movie touches on the themes of family and what it means to be a man, but it doesn’t explore any of them. Dolarhyde has this big talk with Emmett about how he needs to be a man. He tells the kid that when he was a kid, he used a knife to kill an injured man who begged him to kill him. Dolarhyde even gives Emmett the very knife he used, so you’d think the movie would set up a tough moment where Emmett is asked to kill someone in the group.

Nope.

He just uses the knife to kill an alien, which he presumably would have done even if Dolarhyde hadn’t said anything about being a man.

The aliens are never developed as characters, so when the big final raid happens, it’s just humans killing aliens that all look alike and act alike. There’s one alien that has a personal beef with Jake, but he’s there and then he’s dead within a few minutes so it barely registers.

I’m not mad that I watched COWBOYS & ALIENS, but I am disappointed it wasn’t better.

GREEN LANTERN: In Soulless Day, In Dullest Night

Green Lantern (Extended Cut, 2011) – Directed by Martin Campbell – Starring Ryan Reynolds, Blake Lively, Peter Sarsgaard, Mark Strong, Angela Bassett, Temuera Morrison, Geoffrey Rush, Michael Clarke Duncan, Jon Tenney, Jay O. Sanders, Clancy Brown, and Tim Robbins.

GREEN LANTERN is a major disappointment, but not because it’s awful. Rather, it’s a disappointment because it’s so darn mediocre. Despite the action-directing acumen of Martin Campbell and the earnestness of Ryan Reynolds, LANTERN is a dull, lifeless movie that fronts so much heart it doesn’t notice it’s completely lacking in any kind of soul.

Green Lantern has always been my favorite DC character (I was a Marvel kid, but because of Steve Englehart’s writing and the awesomeness of the Green Lantern Corps, GL was my way into the DC Universe), Martin Campbell directed one of the greatest action movies of all time (Casino Royale), and I’ve liked Reynolds going back to his Two Guys, A Girl, and a Pizza Place days. Stars seemed to be aligning for Green Lantern to deliver an amazing cinematic experience: there’s the steady hand of a veteran director, a rising star looking for a franchise, the state of CGI film making has never been better, and there is no hero in comics more tailor-made for CGI than Green Lantern. Add to that the fact that both Campbell and Reynolds were genuinely stoked to be working on the film, with Reynolds taking great pains to assure longtime GL fans that this would be a film that respected the comics, and I was firmly behind the attempt …

Until that first trailer came out, and there was the dorky suit and the crappy CGI and I decided to stop looking at trailers and reading reviews. What I said about the trailer was this: “I do leave convinced that Reynolds is going to be great in this movie and I’m sure the CGI renderings will be cleaned up between now and then. [...] What we ultimately get in the first GREEN LANTERN trailer is the reassurance that the movie won’t suck without the promise of it actually being any good.”

Look, sometimes you watch a trailer and they’re deceiving, and sometimes they are exactly right, and in this case, it was pretty spot-in. My take on the LANTERN trailer is much more right than wrong; after seeing the film, I’d say Reynolds is very good instead of being great but LANTERN is a movie hits that forgettable middle.

GREEN LANTERN is a bit unique in that it’s not the trailer that’s deceptive – it’s the poster. Most of the movie posters and the Blu-ray/DVD packaging emphasize the Corps, but stare at the cover for 15 minutes and that’s just about as much Corps as you get in this movie. Astoundingly Earthbound, GREEN LANTERN’s visual packaging does everything it can to play up the Corps and outer space, yet the film does everything it can to stay AWAY from OA and the Lanterns. It’s a horrendous choice and speaks to just how confused Campbell, Reynolds, and the rest of the production and marketing staff are over what they want to do with this film.

Take Hal Jordan. He’s endearing because he’s a kid who sees his dad get blown up. Then he’s a scoundrel because he grows up, sleeps around and doesn’t take his job seriously. Then he’s a brilliant pilot. Then he’s a dick who screws up a test and ruins the company. Then he’s a great uncle. Then he’s whisked across the universe. Then he runs away. Then it turns out he didn’t ruin the company, after all. Then he saves lives. Then he’s dressed down by the woman he loves for being a coward. Then he admits he’s afraid. Then he’s all heart. I mean, all heart. He’s so all heart that he runs back to Oa and makes an impassioned appeal to the Guardians, and then he’s so all heart that he goes back to earth and makes an impassioned plea to Hector Hammond (Peter Sarsgaard) to not be mean, and none of it – absolutely none of it – feels like anything more than a random set of attitudes. It’s not character development as much as it is character contrivance.

And here’s the thing – Reynolds is good at all of it. He’s been doing snark for years but he does a surprisingly decent job doing heart, too. The problem is they push it too far, turning him too earnest too fast so that it just rings false. It’s compounded by having Hal be such a convert to earnestness that Reynolds comes off in the back-half of the movie as naive, or even brainwashed.

There’s a naive quality to the whole movie, like we’re trying to shoehorn the contemporary Green Lantern concept into some old-fashioned throwback idea. The good guys are super gorgeous and the bad guys are super ugly. The whole opening with Hal as a kid, and Carol Ferris as a kid, and Hector Hammond as a kid … it just doesn’t work. Especially since the big payoff is that Hal watches his dad (a test pilot for Ferris Industries) crash his jet and then, as Hal runs to the scene of the accident, beating everyone else, the jet blows up just as daddy is climbing out of the cockpit. It’s unusually cruel and, more damningly, there’s no effective payoff for it. (We even get to watch it in flashback about 15 minutes after we watch it the first time.)

There’s no effective payoff for anything in GREEN LANTERN. Hal watches his dad blow-up and then tries to live up to his dad’s legacy by never being afraid of anything. Of course, as Carol (Blake Lively) tells him, his dad was afraid, he was just good at hiding it. When Hal admits he gets afraid, too, that frees him up to become a hero. It’s a nice transitional moment but Hal’s transformation to Mr. Earnest just sort of happens instead of feeling like a breakthrough.

Another issue with the film is that the CGI is for crap. Almost all of the events in space (the few times we actually go to space) look completely phony. The opening sequence of the film introduces us to Parallax (voiced by Clancy Brown) looks like a cut sequence from a Halo knock-off, not a major motion picture. When Hal goes to Oa, it doesn’t look much better. Tomar Re (voiced by Geoffrey Rush) is the same. So’s Oa. It all looks incredibly cheap, stilted, and phony, and these ridiculous uniforms the Corps wears smacks of someone on the movie end deciding they could do it without wondering if they should.

The CGI does work in regards to the ring effects. Parallax looks good, too, once he gets to Earth, menacing Coast City like some alien Cthulu, but it’s not enough.

I realize it is a bit hypocritical of me to complain that the film doesn’t spend enough time in space at the same time I’m arguing that the space CGI looks cheap, but as I mentioned, it’s a conflicted film.

Back to the lack of payoffs: little ever comes back around to be worth our time in the first place. We see Hal, Carol, and Hector as kids and then see them as adults, but there’s no emotional connection between them. Hector reveals that he’s always been in love with Carol but that Hal got in the way, but it’s just a line. I don’t ever feel that Hector really loves Carol; I feel like his fascination with Carol is more a reflection of his general unhappiness at how his life turned out.

Which, to be honest, seems to be a general dissatisfaction with his own ugliness and awkwardness and failure to be loved by daddy (Tim Robbins).

Which brings me to Carol. I’ll say this for Blake Lively, she’s the only actor in the film who wholly belongs in the film. While everyone else is busy playing superhero or politician or intergalactic soldier (the GLC don’t do any cop things in the film) or crazy-head-expanding scientist, Lively seems to realize this is an absurdist story about a little boy in a man’s body struggling to please his absent father. Carol is a daddy’s girl pilot-slash-businesswoman (with no daddy issues) who’s into Hal yet continually frustrated/disappointed by him. I say “into” and not “in love with” because Hal and Carol demonstrate all the chemistry of two really good looking people who decided one day that they were always going to be the two most good looking people in any room they were ever going to be in, so they might as well have attractive person sex together. After Hal tells her about Oa, she doesn’t ask him, “Are you stoned?” She just accepts that he’s now part of an intergalactic police force and then scolds him for running away, yet again. The alien space cops don’t matter – running away does.

Lively delivers the best line in the movie; when Hal-as-GL shows up after he’s saved her life, Carol recognizes him. “How did you …?” “I’ve seen you naked,” she answers, “you think I’m not going to recognize you because I can’t see your cheekbones?” It’s a good line, but there’s not enough of them. Reynolds delivers a few early on when he’s in jerk/snark mode, but the film is so interested in getting him past that personification that there’s not enough of it.

Another big problem with LANTERN is that it doesn’t properly set-up its villains. We have a binary with Hal and Hector (the two little boys in adult bodies) but Hector’s not a real threat. He gets infected by a bit of Parallax’s yellow energy and gains the ability to hear other people’s thoughts. Then his skull starts expanding, turning him horrendously ugly. It’s so childish and old-fashioned and it doesn’t work because Hector’s not the real bad guy. He’s just the cinematic patsy to get Parallax to Earth.

Parallax as the villain doesn’t work, either, because the film spends loads of time telling us he’s the Big Bad and the biggest threat the Corps has ever faced, but then the Corps and the Guardians are all like, “You got this, Newbie,” when Hal comes and asks them for help. They decide they’ll make their stand someplace other than Earth and they’re completely willing to sacrifice Earth in the process.

No, really, that’s what they do.

Seriously, how does this make us like the Corps or the Guardians? Why would we want Hal to side up with these elitist space pigs?

I kept waiting for the Corps to realize the error of their ways and show up at Earth anyway to help take down Parallax, but apparently the film makers are more interested in showing that now that Hal admits he’s afraid of things he gets to be the Greatest Hero Ever. When Sinestro (Mark Strong), Kilowog (voiced by Michael Clarke Duncan), and Tomar Re show up it’s just to stop Hal from falling into the sun, not to actually help defeat Parallax. Kilowog crows about how he knows how to train Lanterns and Sinestro tosses some compliments Hal’s way at a meeting of all Lanterns (as I said, the Lanterns don’t police, they soldier with Oa as their base), but it all rings false since none of them were there to help. It’s like the cool kids in high school making a show of liking the uncool kid because they find out the uncool kid has a car and free access to booze.

The only time all film when I became emotionally invested was in the epilogue when Sinestro tries on the yellow power ring. As his costume turned yellow and the best villain in the DC Universe was born, that gave me chills, but only because of the fanboy in me. The film doesn’t make Sinestro a compelling character; it just makes him look like a small-headed weirdo.

On the whole, GREEN LANTERN is a truly frustrating movie. Neither good nor horrible, with some parts that work and others that don’t, with bad CGI, a truly horrific score by the usually solid James Newton Howard, LANTERN never gets up and running. It’s the kind of film that’s always searching for what it wants to be, and while Reynolds is game for all of it, he never embodies an actual person.

THE BURROWERS: Skinny Woman. Might as Well Poke the Boy.

The Burrowers (2008) – Directed by JT Petty – Starring Karl Geary, Clancy Brown, William Mapother, Laura Leighton, Sean Patrick Thomas, Doug Hutchison, and Galen Hutchison.

When I decided I was going to do Western month, I made the decision that I wanted breadth more depth; which is to say, I was more interested in seeing the variety of Westerns than I was seeing, say, all the Clint Eastwood films or all the spaghetti westerns. I wanted a mix of what the genre could do, and given my contribution to HOW THE WEST WAS WEIRD, VOLUME 2, I knew I wanted to check out something that was both Western and supernatural.

And that led me to THE BURROWERS (the over-under is 5 on how many times I type BORROWERS instead of BURROWERS), a Western/Horror movie that sees a band of men heading out into the plains to search for women kidnapped by, they believe, Indians but are actually being poisoned, stored, and then eaten by the Burrowers, an underground species of ancient beasts.

Any story that blends genres has to decide on the mix quantity – is it a Western with horror elements? A horror story in the setting of the West? A 50/50 mix? THE BURROWERS is a Western that slowly becomes a horror movie, but it never loses its Western foundation as the men struggle to come to grips with what’s happening.

I like that about the film. When the men come to investigate the original Burrowers attack, they see only the handiwork of Indians, and until they come face-to-face with the Burrowers and can’t deny the truth of the situation, they doggedly hold to Indian attack. Forget liking that about the film – I love that about THE BURROWERS, as the film also doggedly holds on to its Western roots until it can no longer deny those roots share the dirt with some seriously big creepy-crawlies.

It would have been easy, of course, to have a character in here that was some western Fox Mulder or Harry D’Amour, and while that could have been a totally awesome film, too, I’m glad this film doesn’t have that because the confusion of the characters – their willingness or unwillingness to accept a non-Indian attack theory – adds a dogged stubbornness and tragic quality to their pursuit. The most rugged of the men, John Clay (the always awesome Clancy Brown) even remarks at one point to Parcher (William Mapother) that this is all something they haven’t seen before, but the words hang in the movie, the characters unwilling to walk fully down that road, despite the strange, circular indentations in the ground that they can’t explain.

Even when they capture a lone Indian and he mentions the Burrowers by name, everyone thinks (or perhaps forces themselves to think) he’s talking about a particular Indian tribe they’ve never heard of before.

The narrative is driven by Fergus Coffey’s (Karl Geary) desire to find Maryanne, the woman he’s attempting to make his own. I like that, too. It would be the easy thing to have Maryanne be Coffey’s engaged wife, but it adds a level of desperation to the narrative that she’s just the woman Coffey is courting. It makes his want for her doubled because he’s not trying to get something back, but rather he’s still trying to prove himself to Maryanne. when he realizes near the beginning of the movie’s final act that Maryanne has got to be dead, it both crushes him and steels him; he knows he’ll never rescue Maryanne, but that makes him all the more determined to rescue Parcher.

Coffey is located in the middle of the group. At first, Parcher, Clay, Coffey, and Dobie (Galen Hutchison) hook up with a United States cavalry group, led by the cartoonish Henry Victor (Doug Hutchison), but after Victor okays the torture of a captured Indian, the group bails on him and goes their own way, joined by Walnut Callaghan (Sean Patrick Thomas), Victor’s black cook.

I bring up Callaghan’s race because there’s a funny exchange between him and Coffey over it. When Callaghan introduces himself to Coffey while they’re riding horseback, the Irishman Coffey asks with a smile, “Are you Irish?” Then when Coffey tells Walnut his name, Callaghan asks, “Are you black?” Good stuff. I like how Coffey and Callaghan are drawn to each other, not because the movie needs a progressive liberal to downplay the era’s racism, but because the Irish and black populations of the country shared space at the bottom of the society’s ladder. This is not to suggest, of course, that all Irishmen and freed slaves were pals in the latter quarter of the nineteenth century, but that it makes sense that Coffey, a junior member of the search party would bond with Walnut if any of them would.

Another aspect of the Western that Petty makes terrific use of is the accelerated road to manhood. Dobie is a teenage boy that gets taken along, in large part, because Parcher is courting his mom (still gorgeous Laura Leighton – has it really been 19 years since Melrose Place debuted?). Dobie is largely just there, trying both to stay out of the way and fit in, until the group finds a girl submerged in the dirt who is somehow still alive. We learn later that the Burrowers poison their victims in order to paralyze them, bury the bodies, and then let them rot a bit before coming back to eat the soft parts. Knowing the girl needs help but unwilling to abandon the search for Maryanne and the others they’re after, the group puts Dobie in charge of bringing the girl to get help. It seems absurd, of course, for us that a teenager would be placed in charge of taking a young girl to safety in the midst of dangerous Indian territory, but the group sees no other option, and it’s actually safer to try and get Dobie out of harm’s way instead of keeping him part of the group as they journey on.

Dobie’s youth is all too evident when he pulls the girl off the wagon to allow her to sleep on the ground. Nervously and awkwardly, he kisses her lips in a show of sympathy that’s nonetheless inappropriate. Dobie’s fate isn’t a kind one, as Petty spares almost no one from a cruel end. On his first night with the girl, he’s poisoned by the Burrowers and stuck in the dirt. Later, one of the group will pass close by Dobie’s place in the dirt, but not see him laying there.

Petty makes good use of American Indians, too, refusing to treat them as a universal group. Petty understands that different tribes had different takes on the world, and interacted with each other in all manner of ways. Petty employs one Indian as a lackey for Victor, another as the tortured captive, a third as a women who’s seen her family destroyed by the Burrowers, and two Utes, who are viewed as the experts at killing Burrowers.

Petty doesn’t compromise on the violence, and he never loses sight of the politics of the time. BURROWERS does a slow burn to its full-on existence as a horror movie, and if you sat down to watch the film wanting to see a Western 30 Days of Night, you’re likely to be disappointed. BURROWERS is a Western through and through, with a satisfying streak of horror blended in. The two genres crash into each other for the film’s violent, almost slasher-esque climax.