Cowboys & Aliens

Meshing a dusty old west side story with slick sc-fi stuff - pretty jaunty task if you ask me. Jon Favreau’s Cowboys & Aliens...well its bizarre - but yes it works. Sci-fi is the deal but the old dusty cowboy stuff is cool as well. But an attempt to mix them together -- well it has consequences of course. Not only is the script a mess but the acting is up to some extent a bit flat. As a result we have a movie that starts out slow but does try to pick up speed in the middle...the key word 'try'.

But its not what goes wrong - its what doesn't go right. The setup is fine. A man (Daniel Craig) wakes up in the New Mexico outback with no memory of who he is or how he got there. Or why a strange metal bracelet is locked around his wrist. When confronted by a mean gang of three men on horseback, he quickly kills them with his fists and legs. So far good enough. He mounts a horse and rides into an archetypically dusty small town, where he encounters a mean bully named Percy (Paul Dano) and quickly kicks him in the crotch when Percy demands the stranger make a "contribution." Trying to retaliate, Percy ineptly kills one of the town's deputy sheriffs, provoking the ire of the Sheriff (Keith Carradine) and prompt incarceration. After the stranger is identified by a "Wanted" poster as mean outlaw Jake Longergan, he joins Percy in jail, but not before a brief encounter with the beautiful Ella Swanson (Olivia Wilde), who claims to know something about him.

Before Lonergan can concern himself with an escape plan, aliens swoop in and steal a number of key members of the community, and the rescue mission lands on the shoulders of Dolarhyde, Swenson, and subsequently Lonergan -- who hopes that tracking the aliens to their base will give him answers to his past.

There's five storylines and none of them are particularly interesting. Part of the problem is that we hardly learn anything about the characters and they rarely interact with each other. There’s no banter, there’s no complex relationships, and while they may share scenes, they hardly ever speak to each other. It’s the most basic screenwriting the nine writers credited to the film could muster: here’s what these characters want (and Lonergan’s motives become nebulous by the third act).

There’s no real attempt to have the genres interact in a meaningful way beyond “Look at how technology changes the relationship between the conqueror and the conquered.” The story even goes so far as to reveal that the aliens are after our gold. More problematic is that the aliens’ motives and our characters’ understanding of the aliens changes from scene to scene. We eventually learn that the aliens are abducting humans so they can study us and learn our weaknesses before beginning the real invasion. But their ship is still mining gold. Are the aliens just thoughtful multi-taskers. And oddly, bullets don’t do much but a well timed charge with a wooden spear seems to do the trick.

The success of the film is largely due to a great performance from Daniel Craig -- who leads the cast with the same subtle intensity that made him a stand-out in his other films. Craig’s performance as Lonergan is a great mix of charming western swagger and modern physicality -- convincing in both rough and tumble action choreography as well as quiet contemplation while rolling a cigarette. Sadly, as I have already stated, the same cannot be said for the majority of the supporting cast. Considering the fact that the film sports an incredible ensemble of performers -- most characters are under served. 

It's not that Cowboys & Aliens is bad, per se, just that it pokes along rather than galloping. It wants to be a Western, but it's a horse opera that relies upon the novelty of an alien invasion to perk up the plot, which dawdles when it needs to dash. There's no real emotional bite to the loss of all the townspeople who got roped by riders in the sky; it's just a device to herd the story along to its inevitable final battle. It is also a real shame about the zero sci-fi - larger world build isn't really interesting. That said, despite flat characters and a campy premise -- moment to moment the film definitely offers some exciting set-pieces, enjoyable character banter, and bizarre but intriguing visual spectacle. Seeing the cowboy and alien worlds collide on the battlefield is interesting and forces the characters to come up with some intriguing solutions for dispatching their would-be conquerors -- especially when the full extent of the aliens’ reach is revealed.

There’s no doubt that audiences will enjoy the Cowboys & Aliens experience -- since it mostly delivers on its promise of an exciting genre mash-up.

Cowboys & Aliens

Tron: Legacy

There has only been one franchise that has successfully launched a video game, become immensely popular and then become a passable film. That was Tomb Raider and Angelina Jolie had a lot to do with it.

Even harder to achieve is to turn a film into a successful video game and then remade into another film. Unsurprisingly, it is the comic books that lead the way. Batman (which was first a TV series) has been made into many films and also has a few different versions of games on various platforms.

Also successful is Spiderman and Fantastic Four as well as the comic book-based game Marvel Ultimate Alliance (all the superheroes in one giant story).

With the help of a popular toy (Lego), film franchise Indiana Jones was successfully transported from film to game console. Lego has done the same with Batman and Harry Potter. But before Lego, 3D, Xbox and even Nintendo it began with Tron. Made in 1982, Tron was ahead of its time. It was made into five different video games that featured the same cool transportation, the light cycle.

Joseph Kosinski’s renewed and reinvigorated TRON is certainly one of the most eagerly anticipated films since Avatar, and that anticipation is largely due to the avowed cult status of Steven Lisberger’s 1982 original. That film – with it’s mixture of archaic CGI, live action, and crude hand drawn animation – is arguably the most important and innovative special effects film ever made; but its simple plot and memorable performances also rendered it an unforgettable film in the hearts of film fans who worried about the sickly smooth aesthetics of Star Wars and the Rocky films.

To impress any of the legions of eager viewers awaiting his first feature, Kosinski had to do two things: create stunning visual effects that rivalled, and hopefully surpassed, those of Avatar; and create a memorable, quirky, and enjoyable story to hold it all together. He has succeeded wonderfully in the former, and perhaps predictably failed dismally in the latter.

The effects are truly ravishing. The 3D doesn’t kick in until Sam (Hedlund), the son of disappeared computer genius Kevin Flynn (Bridges), is transported into The Grid – a cyber-world created by Flynn, in which he has been trapped for the past 20 years. Over the space of those 20 years, the rudimentary, almost analogue, neon minimalism of the original film’s alternate reality has evolved over countless ‘cycles’ to produce a world so rich in glassy texture and sleek quicksilver cities that it more closely resembles a futuristic vision of earth than a more abstract idea of a ‘cyber world’ based on 0s and 1s. Kosinski’s background in architecture is clear – The Grid is a stunning futuristic vision, a cross between Philip K Dick and the Bauhaus. Kosinski was determined to honour the original film by avoiding complete reliance on CGI, so many of the sets are tangible, created out of concrete and glass, and you can feel their weight on the screen.

But is this an entirely positive point? This is supposed to be a vision of a ‘cyber world’ created entirely out of digital programmes. It necessarily needs to be anthropomorphised in order to be understood as a ‘mythic’ story, but is the chic interior design and the hog roast dinner entirely necessary? When Sam arrives on The Grid he is disrobed and prepared by four android-like ‘sirens’, and he later bumps into one of them as she is finishing her shift and leaving “the office” with an umbrella! What exactly is she protecting herself from in this instance? Cyber rain? There is something disappointingly easy about this interpretation of The Grid, which in the original film was a much more abstract space simply due to the limitations of technology. The wonders of the modern world have allowed Kosinski to render a truly outstanding vision on screen, but whether it is the right vision or the honest vision for TRON is debatable.

Two unquestionable triumphs should be mentioned though: the first is Daft Punk’s glitchy, techno score. Their infectious, cosmic dance pop is a perfect fusion of the organic and the ‘technologic’. It is at once cold and monotonous yet energised and vibrant. The second is the most important element of the TRON the disk battles and light cycles of legend are absolutely stunning, taking place in gigantic stadia before enormous crowds of baying ‘programmes’. The glistening quicksilver appearance of the bikes’ trails is breathtaking in 3D, and the battles themselves are easily as thrilling as anything James Cameron has ever created. The commend the film on their own, regardless of the success, or lack thereof, of the overall story.

The story, alas, falls in between the cracks of the wonderful aesthetic choices. The evolution of The Grid has been plagued by the controlling, cancerous influence of Clu – a ‘programme’ built by Flynn in his own image to create a ‘perfect world’ on The Grid, while Flynn was busy battling corporations in the real world. Clu’s pursuit of a non-existent ideal has led to a dangerous and dark world of dogma, destruction, and genocide. Sam’s unlikely arrival provides a brief opportunity for Flynn to defeat Clu and escape The Grid… and so the fight is on. This could have been a halfway interesting story, but it really is not. Essentially the story involves father and son, and Flynn’s adopted cyber-daughter Quorra, travelling across a barren landscape and getting into a few fracas before, well, winning. Somehow this random trip provides Sam with the cathartic, epiphanic inspiration he needed to “find himself” and turn his life around on returning to the real world. This is like a ‘Sci-fi action epic’ jus – a boiling pot of Gladiator, Star Wars, and The Matrix left on a high heat until all that is left is a sickly syrup of clichés and half-baked ideas.

The acting unfortunately, fails to save the piece. Jeff Bridges does nothing wrong as Flynn or, thanks to some wonderful visual effects, in his younger incarnation as Clu. But there has never been any doubt that Bridges’ talent lies in subtle and sincere character studies, rather than sci-fi epics. Garrett Hedlund is inoffensive as Sam, but he is either too young to too incapable of finding a way to save his vacuous character’s journey by adding some intangible dimension of emotional honesty

In the end, this is a travesty of a story and a failure of a sequel, but an absolute triumph for CGI… it is to the originalTRON what Avatar is to Ferngully.

Tron: Legacy