Cowboys & Aliens (2011) is a film over which I am torn. It looks cool but it sounds ridiculous. I've read the script -- it's total crap. Written by the two skillfully-overpaid dudes who wrote the Transformers films. The idea was nothing more than a stupidly ironic comic-book panel when the rights were bought. The project has "thinking-man's nightmare" written all over it.Yet somehow they got a director as competent as Jon Favreau to sign on, a cast which includes Daniel Craig, Olivia Wilde, and Harrison Ford, and now, dammit, a picture of the main character looking so damn cool!
I have resigned my resignations and readily admit that this film will make oodles of cash next summer for doing little more than cannibalizing some mediocre action movies and spitting out the bastardized parts, but dammit if it won't look awesome doing as much. I'm sure that's all the studio was going for, to look cool while making money, so well done there, but every time a movie like this gets made, I feel like my world gets a little smaller.
--Serge
I must say I am extremely confused. Orci and Kurtzman wrote the Transformers movies, which were crap, and this film, which you say is crap. However, they also wrote the Star Trek movie from last year, which was not remotely crap. Wha happened?
ReplyDeleteAnd on top of that, IMDb says Damon Lindelof is credited as co-writer on this--and he was a head writer on freakin LOST! How could he possibly disappoint like this. :-(
I think the explanation for Orci and Kurtzman is that they're talented writers who also occasionally sell out. And I'd imagine Lindelof came up with a lot of the script's IDEAS, as in, say, the bracelet around the main character's wrist which transforms into a gun.
ReplyDeleteDon't get me wrong, this movie will LOOK at least as cool as "Iron Man" did, but the nonexistant story arc, the cliched, ridiculously unsympathetic stock characters, and all the hackneyed emotional cheap-shots point to a script that is not meant to do ANYTHING to anyone's brain.
Spoiler Alert! (The love-interest "dies" in the second act, but in a complete betrayal of tension, she's revealed to be an alien and comes back to life not ten pages later. Puh-leeeeez!)
ReplyDeleteYou keep ruining movies for me!
ReplyDelete