9 / 10
Official trailer
Cowboys and Aliens is a straight western with an alien invasion in it, played completely seriously, and I loved every minute. Jon Favreau made it between Iron Man films, and it treats both halves of its title with respect.
Daniel Craig plays Jake Lonergan, who wakes up in the desert with a wound, no memory and a metal band on his wrist he can’t remove. Harrison Ford plays Woodrow Dolarhyde, the cattle baron who owns the town of Absolution and everyone in it. Olivia Wilde plays Ella, a woman with her own reason for being there.
It cost about $163 million and made roughly $174 million, and that counted as a failure. It’s a shame, because it’s a 9: a good western, a good creature film, and a rare case of a high-concept title being played without a wink.
The Setup
Lonergan wakes in the dust, fights off three men who want the bounty on him, takes their clothes and horse, and rides into Absolution. The sheriff recognizes him. So does Dolarhyde, whose gold he stole.
Before anything can be settled, lights appear over the town. Ships drag people into the sky on cables, and the band on Lonergan’s wrist comes alive and shoots one of them down. Dolarhyde’s son is taken. So is the sheriff and half the town. So the cattleman, the outlaw, a preacher, a dog, a boy, a saloon owner looking for his wife and a band of Apache ride out together to get them back.
It Plays It Straight
The premise sounds like a joke, and the film refuses to treat it as one. Nobody makes a quip about aliens. Nobody references a movie. The characters react to flying machines the way people in 1873 would: as demons, as a judgment, as something to be shot at. That commitment is the whole reason it works. The western beats are real western beats, the alien attacks are staged as raids, and the film’s tone never wobbles into comedy.
I think that nerve is the best decision anybody made on this picture. The easy version of this movie winks at you every ten minutes, and I’d have lost interest in that version by the second reel.
Favreau shoots it like a western too. Wide desert, practical locations, hard light, long horizon lines. The creatures move through that landscape instead of replacing it.
For Writers
Favreau takes a premise that invites mockery and plays it with a completely straight face, and the film’s tone holds because of it. Commitment beats irony, because the reader can’t invest in a story the author is laughing at. When you write a strange premise, have your characters treat it with the seriousness they’d bring to anything else that could kill them. Read your dialogue for jokes that acknowledge how silly the situation is. Cut every one and see how much more frightening the scene becomes. A reader who believes your characters are scared will be scared too.
Craig and Ford
Craig plays Lonergan with almost nothing: no memory, few words, and a constant readiness to hurt somebody. It’s a proper western lead performance, closer to Eastwood than to Bond, and he dominates the film physically.
Ford is the best he’d been in years. Dolarhyde is a bully, a bad father and a Civil War veteran who solves problems by force, and Ford plays him sour and unlikable for a long stretch before letting anything soften.
The two of them together are the film’s engine. They dislike each other, they need each other, and neither becomes pleasant. When the alliance finally takes, it’s because both men respect competence, and that’s exactly right for the genre.
Ford is the performance I enjoy most here. He lets Dolarhyde stay mean for so long that when the man finally softens, I believe it, and Craig is smart enough to give him the room.
Favreau Between Iron Men
Favreau made this after two Iron Man films and before The Jungle Book and The Lion King, and it’s the odd one out in his career. He wanted to make a western, and the aliens were what got a western financed at that scale in 2011. You can see the same strengths he brought to Iron Man: actors given room, action staged for clarity, and a willingness to let a scene be quiet. What’s missing is the lightness, and that’s deliberate. The practical work deserves credit too. Real locations in New Mexico, real horses, real dust, and creature effects built as a mix of physical and digital work. The film has weight that a purely digital production of the same year wouldn’t have.
For Writers
Favreau used a science fiction hook to get a western financed, and then made the western he wanted underneath it. A commercial hook can buy you the room to write the book you care about. When the market won’t take your subject on its own, find the element that makes it sellable and build your real interests inside it. Name the part of your story an editor can sell. Then make sure the part you care about is essential.
The Supporting Cast
Sam Rockwell plays the saloon owner who can’t shoot and goes anyway. Adam Beach plays Dolarhyde’s ranch hand, who wants to be the son he never had. Paul Dano is thoroughly hateable as Dolarhyde’s actual son.
Clancy Brown plays the preacher, Keith Carradine the sheriff, and Olivia Wilde carries a role that turns out to be stranger than it looks. Walton Goggins turns up as an outlaw with a grin.
The Apache sequence gives the film its best bit of structure. The men who were fighting each other an hour ago have to fight together, and the film doesn’t smooth that over with speeches.
The Creatures
The aliens are properly designed: heavy, wrong-looking things with a second set of arms that open out of the chest. They’re shown in pieces for most of the film and in full only when the story needs them.
They’re here for gold, a good joke the film never explains at length. They take people to study them, and the prisoners are held in a mine at the bottom of a ship. The action is clear throughout. You know where the ships are, what the wrist weapon can do, how many shots are left. That clarity is the difference between an enjoyable monster film and a blur.
I like these aliens a lot. The gold motive makes me laugh whenever it comes up, and the film has the sense to leave it alone and get back to the shooting.
Why It Failed
The film opened in the summer of 2011 against Harry Potter and Captain America, with a title that sounded like a parody and a marketing campaign that couldn’t decide who it was for.
Western audiences saw aliens. Science fiction audiences saw a western. It was also expensive, and $174 million on a $163 million budget doesn’t survive that math.
Reviews were mixed, mostly complaining that the film was too serious for its own premise. That’s the exact quality I like most about it.
For Writers
Because nobody could tell which audience it was for, Cowboys and Aliens failed commercially, and it’s a better film than its reception. A work that sits between two genres has to give each audience a reason to trust it. When you write a crossover, make sure each genre’s readers get the thing they came for, done properly, and say so plainly in your pitch. Write two sentences: one for each audience. If either sentence makes the book sound like a joke, the packaging needs work, and the book will die on a shelf it never belonged on.
What It Gets Right
The western is real. The town, the gang, the cattle drive, the rivalries and the code are all played as though the aliens never arrived, and that gives the invasion something to interrupt.
The film also understands that a western is about competence and grudges. Everyone in it is good at something, everyone has a reason to distrust somebody else, and the plot moves by people deciding to work with men they hate.
That’s a 9 for me. It’s not deep, and it does everything it sets out to do without apologizing for the title.
Craft Note
Craft Note
The film works because the western half is built properly before the science fiction half arrives. The invasion matters because the town is real, the grudges are real and the men have something to lose. Build the ordinary world with care and your strange element will land in something solid.
Is Cowboys and Aliens worth watching?
Yes. It’s a well-made western with a monster problem, Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford are both excellent, and the creature design is strong. It never treats its own premise as a joke, and it holds up better than its box office suggests. It’s a 9 from me. I loved it beginning to end, and it was dumb to write off a film this committed because of its title and a muddled ad campaign. The only thing keeping it off a 10 is that it’s not deep, and I don’t need it to be.
