Title: Cowboys & Aliens

Opens: July 29, 2011

Here’s an idea you might get after watching “Cowboys & Aliens,” which should instead have the title “Cowboys, Indians & Aliens.” We in America can fix the deficit, create full employment, and draw ourselves, Iran, Venezuela, North Korea and Cuba into a friendly alliance. This is how: you reestablish the draft for men, put women to work at the jobs the men in the armed forces were doing, and get China to forgive our entire debt in return for our military might. We provoke a war with Mars, use our awesome weaponry to help defeat the green people who land on various spots on our planet, and bring all nations together against a common enemy. We created an alliance with the Soviet Union in 1941, didn’t we? Remember the expression: the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Now here is where “Cowboys & Aliens” fits in. In the picture directed with considerable passion and a lot of special effects by Jon Favreau (“Iron Man”) and written by five scripters utilizing three story-tellers, two rival gangsters are brought together, Apache Indians join with the white guys, and a sheriff makes his peace with a man he had wanted to turn over to the feds for murder and robbery. And oh, a bratty, rich kid gains maturity. How did they do it? They did not provoke a war with the aliens but met them on home grounds in New Mexico (where else?), in a war that required the cooperation of formerly hostile earthlings.

“Cowboys & Aliens” is a strange fusion of a genre associated with the past (Westerns are typically set between 1865 and 1890) and one usually thought of as the future. The melding does not exactly work, largely because the initial segment, the one that deals strictly with cowboys, guns, and bar fights, is so good, so well choreographed without the need for much CGI, that the latter parts pale in comparison. Think of Robert Rodriguez’s “From Dusk Till Dawn,” about two criminals and their hostages who take refuge in a place that becomes populated with vampires. Everything was going fine until the unfortunate surprise shows that those we thought of as normal human beings (like most of us) are not what they seemed.

The opening, which sets the tone, is terrific. In this film, executive produced in part by no less than Steven Spielberg, we see a barren landscape in Absolution, New Mexico with no signs of human life. Suddenly Jake Lonergan (Daniel Craig) pops up, coming out of a deep sleep. He sees a strange gadget on his wrist and realizes that he has lost his memory. He knows not who he is, whence he came, and whom he loved. He strolls into town in time to save the folks from a robbery by Percy Dolarhyde (Paul Dano), the last man who needs to rob as he is the spoiled, bratty son of Woodrow Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford), the rich cattle baron. Jake learns who he is through a series of flashbacks that come and go throughout the story, faces down Woodrow Dolarhyde as though upgrading Gary Cooper’s role as Marshall Will Kane in Fred Zinnemann’s “High Noon,” and is confronted by Sheriff John Taggart (Keith Carradine) who clues him in about his past. When UFO’s looking like bats out of hell descend on the town, bullets are useless. The only way to confront the hostile aliens is to round up everybody including former enemies like the Apaches and rival gangs and allow Jake to use his magic bracelet to down the strange flying objects and pulverize the ten-foot aliens.

The Harrison Ford – Daniel Craig combination will likely mean big box office when the picture opens on July 29th and justly so. Ford’s character speaks menacingly just this side of camp while Craig anchors the movie as the only guy who can keep the New Mexico desert in the hands of Americans. But once the cowboys fire at the monstrous foreigners with revolvers and, much more efficiently with shotguns, the tone changes to generic zombie movie. Heads are blown off, blood gushes, and before you can say “Shaun of the Dead” or “1950s aliens,” the green things find themselves no match. Still, it’s not until the beautiful Ella Swenson (Olivia Wilde), whose real identity is kept hidden for most of the story, takes action, nobody is safe, though if Ms. Wilde is intent on being more than a pretty face, her role does not allow her enough latitude.

Matthew Libatique’s lensing convinces us that we’re in a time before autos were invented, when horse thieves were summarily hanged, and cattle roamed the plains rather than swelter in abominable factory farms.

Rated PG-13. 118 minutes. (C) 2011 by Harvey Karten Member: NY Film Critics Online

Overall: B