Cowboys & Aliens

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Movie Details

• Genre: Action/Adventure, Suspense/Thriller
• Release Date: 2011-07-29 Nationwide
• Running Time: 118 min.
• Director: Jon Favreau
• Cast: Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford, Olivia Wilde, Sam Rockwell, Adam Beach, Paul Dano, Noah Ringer
• Producer: Brian Grazer, Ron Howard, Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci, Scott Mitchell Rosenberg
• Writer: Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, Damon Lindelof, Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby
• Distributor: Universal Pictures
• Official Site: Cowboys & Aliens Official Site

Cowboys & Aliens begins in classic, saddle-sore terrain. A lone stranger with a mysterious past—Daniel Craig fills the boots here—rides into a dusty, God-forsaken town in the Arizona territory. There's early tension with Harrison Ford's grizzly rancher-potentate, but soon they have to circle the wagons against a common foe. The classic Cowboys & Indians rivalry played on by the title having fallen out of fashion, today's enemies are literal aliens. Director Jon Favreau's experiment in genre crossbreeding—a Western/sci-fi mashup pumped full of inspirational all-in-this-together spirit—is a cute, crowd-pleasing idea, though more decadent than a revitalization of either genre. The Western is made "fun" again through its dislocation from historical fact. Violence is likewise freed from any moral dimension, with very grotesque extraterrestrials providing new, definitely non-human targets that can guiltlessly be exterminated. Favreau, it should be noted, is an actual storyteller among blockbuster blowhards. As in his handling of the first Iron Man, he displays the increasingly rare ability to patiently lay down the track along which his narrative will move, and gets some amusing work from his performers: Ford, enlivened by dude garb, seems to enjoy himself in front of a camera for the first time in decades.