08/05/2011
'Cowboys & Aliens': The Reviews Are In!
Western meets sci-fi flick is full of 'nifty scenes,' but 'unappealing' overall, critics say.
By Terri Schwartz
Harrison Ford and Daniel Craig in "Cowboys and Aliens"
Photo: Universal
With a concept as inspired as "Cowboys & Aliens" and an A-list cast that brings together James Bond and Indiana Jones themselves, it's hard to imagine what could possibly have gone wrong between bringing the movie from the production room to the big screen. MTV's Splash Page blog found a lot to love about the movie despite its flaws, but other critics have not been so kind.
Maybe it was the fact that director Jon Favreau took the summer blockbuster too seriously. Fans hoping for a tongue-in-cheek mash-up of a Western and an alien movie are in for a straight-laced action flick without a lot of room for humor, like in Favreau's "Iron Man" films. Even the movie's charismatic leads couldn't rescue "Cowboys & Aliens" from its identity crisis, critics are saying.
Still, there was plenty to love about the movie as well. "Cowboys & Aliens" is certainly a fun ride to take this summer, so before you head to the multiplex this weekend, take a gander at the "Cowboys & Aliens" reviews we lassoed up for you.
The Story "The whole aliens-on-the-frontier incongruity never comes to much, really. There are nifty scenes, like the horseback riders battling silvery skeletal airplanes, but what 'Cowboys & Aliens' lacks is a good story. Basically, the characters — [Daniel] Craig's enigmatic outlaw, [Harrison] Ford's scowling boss, a tribe of Apache — must put aside their differences to form a posse and defeat the invaders. Who do we care about onscreen? For all of Craig's edgy charisma, no one. 'Cowboys & Aliens' has fun moments, but it's a plodding entertainment because it mostly tastes like leftovers." — Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly
The Leading Men "In Daniel Craig, the movie has what feels awfully like the second coming of Steve McQueen. Maybe it's the laser blue eyes under the broad forehead, or the laconic refusal to speak except when absolutely necessary, but Craig has a presence here that feels downright mythic. ... The chance to be as mean as he wants to be energizes [Ford], whose storied crankiness finally finds a home. It's a character part, and you can sense Ford's relief at letting another man shoulder the load. Consciously or not, there's a generational passing of the baton just under this movie's surface, and it helps immensely that Craig's up to the task." — Ty Burr, The Boston Globe
The Cowboys and the Aliens "In Hollywood's ancient prime, maybe a third of all movies were Westerns. But those days are as dead as the horse-mounted cavalry; in the past 30 years, the genre has been resuscitated only when some powerful director wanted to make a movie like the ones he grew up loving. So 'Cowboys & Aliens' has got to get to the aliens pretty damn quick. Even here, Favreau and his crew sprinkle a few memorable moments: the aliens' low-flying scout planes, looking like 10-winged titanium dragonflies and lassoing the townspeople for abduction; a desert vision of an upside-down steamship, which momentarily summons the ghost of Werner Herzog's 'Fitzcarraldo'; and the recurring image of Craig retrieving his cowboy hat, whether he's fighting off human varmints or escaping from the aliens' stronghold. A man ain't a man without his Stetson." — Richard Corliss, Time
The Concept "Cowboys versus aliens is a concept that may make you smile in anticipation, but wipe that smile off your face before buying your ticket, because the film takes its subject seriously — deadly seriously in the case of Harrison Ford, who plays a nasty rancher with the snarls and scowls that have become his trademarks, as if in penance for being so charming in the past. One interesting twist has a posse of cowboys teaming up with the Apaches they fear in order to vanquish the aliens, but the storytelling, punctuated by incoherent flashbacks, is often inscrutable." — Joe Morgenstern, The Wall Street Journal
The Final Word "A leaden mash-up of western and science-fiction elements that ends up noisy, grotesque and unappealing, this Jon Favreau-directed film features five producers (including Brian Grazer and Ron Howard), six executive producers (Steven Spielberg and Ryan Kavanaugh among them) and six credited writers, led by 'Star Trek' rebooters Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci and 'Lost's' Damon Lindelof. No wonder the film plays like a business deal more than a motion picture. Listed as a producer, not a writer, is Scott Mitchell Rosenberg, whose concept for the original graphic novel inspired the film. That's right, 'Cowboys' doesn't even retell the story the graphic novel does; it sets out on its own. This is not a satisfying journey." — Kenneth Turan, The Los Angeles Times
Check out everything we've got on "Cowboys & Aliens."
For breaking news and previews of the latest comic book movies — updated around the clock — visit SplashPage.MTV.com.
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'Cowboys & Aliens' And The Box Office: A Summer Battle
Why was alien/Western mash-up's $36.2 million debut considered a failure?
By Eric Ditzian
Harrison Ford and Daniel Craig in "Cowboys & Aliens"
Photo: Universal
Hollywood box-office quiz time! One Steven Spielberg-produced alien flick based on an original idea hits theaters this summer, earns $35.4 million in its opening weekend and is roundly praised as proof that original ideas (those not based on board games and theme-park rides and the like) can thrive in the pop-culture marketplace. Another Steven Spielberg-produced alien flick that might as well have been based on an original idea (considering how few people had actually read the graphic novel on which it was based and how screenwriters changed everything except the title) hits theaters this summer, opens to $36.2 million during its first weekend and is tagged a major disappointment.
What gives? Well, in the comparison between the praised "Super 8" and the rebuked "Cowboys & Aliens," a lot, including budget, talent and a certain genre hybrid that just never seems to connect with moviegoers.
" 'Cowboys & Aliens' arrived with big-budget Hollywood hype — the stars (Harrison Ford, Daniel Craig), the huge budget ($160+ mil), and the above-the-line pedigree (Jon Favreau, Ron Howard and Steven Spielberg)," said Jeff Bock, box-office analyst for Exhibitor Relations. "On the other end of the spectrum, 'Super 8' carried none of the big production clutter, and most impressively, was made for a third of what 'C&A' cost."
Projections heading into the weekend pegged "Cowboys" to gross in the $40 million to $50 million range, on par with something you'd expect from a movie based on an original idea with marquee talent on both sides of the camera. But reviews were tepid, the public has never shown a deep love for alien/Western mash-ups and, as Gitesh Pandya of Box Office Guru notes, "Cowboys" was the eleventh action movie released this summer. Its audience was also 53 percent male, leading Phil Contrino, editor of Boxoffice.com, to speculate that Universal could have tried to appeal more to women.
"[Star] Olivia Wilde wasn't included in the marketing blitz as much as she should have been," he said. "Going after fanboys can be a risky bet, because it often means that you're alienating other groups."
Perhaps "Cowboys" might have excelled at the box office in March, when even something like "Battle: Los Angeles" (a poorly reviewed original movie, its most recognizable face Aaron Eckhart's) was able to gross $35.6 million. Between the crowded summer calendar, the weak reviews and the unpalatable subject matter, "Cowboys" simply had too many cards stacked against it to thrive. It's likely to drop hugely in its second weekend. While hardly an outright bomb like "Sucker Punch," another original concept, "Cowboys" has stumbled enough to provide Hollywood with some valuable lessons.
To begin, studios are likely to stay far away from the alien/Western concept for a while. What's more, "Cowboys" shows once again that even A-list talent can't ensure a big opening. But what "Cowboys" won't do is make Hollywood shy away from basing films on less-recognizable properties or even original ideas altogether.
"Studios are already gambling on properties that are not based on recognizable properties, and most of them are big-budget sci-fi spectacles," Bock said. "Call it the 'Avatar' effect. Currently, there are nearly a dozen in production, many in 3-D. Most of them do have one thing in common: a dearth of big-name stars. Look for that trend to continue, as studios continue to bulk up the budget with SFX instead of stars."
Check out everything we've got on "Cowboys & Aliens."
For breaking news and previews of the latest comic book movies — updated around the clock — visit SplashPage.MTV.com.
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08/04/2011
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'Cowboys & Aliens': Jon Favreau Talks Creating Creatures
Steven Spielberg and Guillermo del Toro advised director, who aimed to 'maintain some mystery and surprises.'
By Eric Ditzian
Daniel Craig in "Cowboys & Aliens"
Photo: Universal Pictures
How do you surprise someone who's seen it all — aliens who snatch bodies and aliens with dreadlocks and aliens who bloodily birth themselves from your stomach and aliens who phone home and aliens who eat cat food and great big blue aliens with tails they use for sex?
Forget about the decades of classic extraterrestrial flicks that stream daily on TV, tablets and desktops. This year alone, movies like "Battle: Los Angeles," "Super 8," "Green Lantern" and "Transformers: Dark of the Moon" have hit the big screen, each trying to deliver not only eye-popping visuals but the post-credits comment between friends, "Damn, dude, have you ever seen something like that?"
The answer, all too often and quite understandably, is, "Yes, yes, I have." That's the challenge "Cowboys & Aliens" director Jon Favreau faced as he sought to bring alien baddies to the Old West for a genre mash-up that hit theaters Friday (July 29). Favreau, though, counts himself lucky that he was able to lean on some of the most-established sci-fi players in Hollywood for help. The cinematic result is a race of aliens that land in a down-on-its-luck mining town, start to kidnap residents and eventually reveal themselves as extraterrestrial superfreaks on par with anything we've seen at the theater in recent years.
Earlier this month in Montana, Favreau talked with MTV News about what makes a great big-screen alien, the special-effects decisions that helped his filmmaking process and the advice Steven Spielberg and Guillermo del Toro gave him along the way. (Beware of spoilers below.)
"When you set out to make a movie like 'Cowboys & Aliens,' if you just play it as one joke for the whole movie, you're in trouble," Favreau explained. "You run out of gas after about the length of an 'SNL' sketch. So we really wanted to find an approach that could bear out a whole story. Part of it was identifying what kind of alien movie to make and what kind of cowboy movie to make."
The answer to the alien question was to reach back to classics of the '70s and '80s, before CG glam overtook practical effects as the preferred method of creating otherworldly creatures. "The alien movies I like the most are the ones I grew up with," he said. "It was the pre-CG, almost verging on horror versions of alien films, like 'Alien,' 'Aliens,' 'Predator' and all the Spielberg stuff, and I include 'Jaws' in that, too. They were all the same kind of movie.
"It was before you had computer effects, so you had to, through lighting and mystery and music, slowly reveal the creature. That technique has some somewhat been lost now, thanks to CGI. Even though we have CGI creatures eventually, we do use animatronics and we do use lighting and all the old techniques to reveal them."
The aliens in "Cowboys" have landed in an Arizona town to mine for gold — a metal as precious to humans as it is to these space travelers. What's truly cool about them is their transformative quality: Their faces move and shift to expose layers below, and their bodies open up to unleash hidden, gooey hands. Gross and fascinating and scary, all at once. That's exactly what Favreau was hoping to accomplish.
" 'Predator' and 'Alien': What was fun about those films is, as you saw the creatures, more and more layers were revealed, whether it was armor coming off with 'Predator' [and] weaponry, or in the case of 'Alien,' with the second set of teeth or the metamorphosis that it did from its egg state to the face-hugger to whatever that larval phase was when it busts out of your chest and finally into the big [creature]," he said. "It's the shape-shifting quality of the aliens that I thought was really cool. We wanted to maintain some mystery and surprises with our creature."
To create those surprises, Favreau not only depended on his team of artists and effects masters, but on Spielberg and del Toro. "[Spielberg] was very involved with certain aspects of it preproduction, and one of those aspects was the alien design, because he's been involved with so many," he said. "And now seeing 'Falling Skies' and seeing 'Super 8,' I see that he was not just involved with his own films, but other films and projects he's been producing and overseeing. He had a lot of specific insight into what things were important.
"And Guillermo del Toro, I also know him, and he's masterful," Favreau added. "He always said you've got to get the silhouette right first and then you got to get the color right and then you got to get the detail right, in that order. He's actually somebody who helped out and came in the editing room. I was showing him our animatronic work, because he's very picky about that stuff, and when I knew it passed his muster, I felt very good."
Check out everything we've got on "Cowboys & Aliens."
For breaking news and previews of the latest comic book movies — updated around the clock — visit SplashPage.MTV.com.
Related Videos Related PhotosSource: http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1668176/cowboys-and-aliens-creatures.jhtml
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