Movie Reviews: Cowboys & Muggles & Geeks
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Apart from the superhero flicks this summer, I’ve reviewed a few other blockbuster-flavored movies at Badmouth.net. Super 8 uber alles!
Cowboys & Aliens: Perfect title encapsulating a dynamite concept, excellent cast working with a story that gives them a chance to, you know, act a little, but the filmmakers fail to really exploit the mashup. Why all this melee combat that’s not ultimately different from the Lord of the Rings movies or the god-awful Clash of the Titans remake? Where, for the love of Gary Cooper, is the scene where a lone cowboy hero and the last or best of the aliens faces off at opposite ends of deserted street? You got a brilliant idea, you gotta work it! Full Review.
Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows Part 2: Part eight in a seven part series! While the previous installment was all boring setup and hand-wringing, this one’s all nailbiting conclusion … if you’re a well-versed Harry Potter fan who can keep all the details straight. While I can understand the filmmakers figuring there’s no point in accommodating “new viewers” eight films in, they also pretend there’s no such thing as a casual Harry Potter fan, rather than the diehards who do remember all those bit-character students whose arrival seems to somehow matter. Still, good enough fun for the Potter-neutral. Full Review.
Super 8: Not the film’s most slam-bang adventuring, but easily the most satisfying. There’s nothing wrong with this movie. Even the massive CGI train wreck, which is tonally, visually out of place with the rest of the film, is so spectacular, and over so quickly, that you can’t hold it against Abrams. 
Most of Abrams’ previous projects have had tremendous ambitions–multi-year TV series with convoluted mysteries and interrelationships, or the relaunch of a massively beloved sci-fi franchise. In such big projects, he’s had some great success, but always with a bit of failure. This film has much narrower ambitions, and he nails ‘em all magnificently. Full Review.
If bad summer comedies are more your speed — and why would they be? — you can check out how much I disliked Bad Teacher, or if middle-of-the-road mediocrity is your thing, there’s Larry Crowne.
How about you? Seen anything good lately?
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Good review. Cowboy’s & Aliens really had me for the first 30 minutes or so. The western elements were played beautifully as if this wasn’t a genre mash up, but a brand new story set in a believable west. It isn’t a borrowed world from some familiar old western, but a worthy and interesting story set up.
Then, for me, the whole movie takes a jarring mis-step which (coincidentally?) seems to mark where the story stops working. Right after the first alien attack on the town has ended and the streets are still filled with smoke, Ford’s ruthless cattle-baron realizes Daniel Craig has the only weapon that hurts aliens. Ford insists on Craig’s help. Craig flatly refuses and walks away, back turned to Ford who is holding a loaded rifle. By everything we saw in the movie up to that point, Ford should have shot Craig in the back and taken the wrist gun. Instead, not only does he NOT shoot or threaten Craig, he lets Craig walk off, get a horse and leave town.
There begins the long, forced “rehabilitation” of Ford’s character which takes place in a series of scenes that run completely parallel to the actual story. None of it matters to the real story at hand. And, for my money, none of it really made sense.
It was this split, when the movie becomes both Craig’s story and Ford’s story, that torpedoed the script in my opinion. Too bad because I really loved the first 35 minutes or so.
Dude,
Good point. In my head, and Petra’s, we bought that because we had the idea (based partly on the fact that Craig didn’t even know how the thing works, and obviously had acquired it by accident or through some agency other than himself) that if Ford shot him, he’d never be able to make the dingus work.
Of course, Ford couldn’t have known that, and should therefore have shot Craig and maybe found out, oops, that was a mistake. I DID think that the rehabilitation of Ford was a mistake, because I was so happy seeing Ford play not-a-good-guy, which is SO rare for him, but I didn’t take it apart the way you did.
Petra notes: “I bought that the flying and laser stuff was so out of Ford’s reality that he couldn’t think of it as ‘I can just take it and use it myself.’” What Ford was witnessing was so miraculous and strange that he couldn’t just solve it in the simple, mechanical way that you saw, and that I agree is a sensible thought process. I actually think that’s a good No Prize solution to the story flaw, but I doubt the filmmakers had that in mind, so, really, you win.
Aw shucks– if I win we all lose!
I wanted to buy into the same thought Petra proposes myself– but I still couldn’t make it work because no matter how little he may have believed he could personally make the wrist gun work, he has every reason to believe that if Craig walks away with it, then he will never see the wrist gun again. So why let it go? Besides, Craig was walking away slow– Ford had plenty of time to carefully shoot any part of Craig’s person he wanted — then he could have “persuaded” Craig in the fashion we saw him use on the cowhands earlier. Then the movie would have rocked. Craig Vs. Ford was what I was hoping for– Not Craig Vs. flashbacks and Ford Vs. His Own Prejudices against adopted indian son.
Furthermore, at that point Ford knows who Craig is better than Craig does. Ford’s character has a strong “anything you can do, I can do better” mentality up to that moment. It feels wrong to me imagining him concluding that he must let Craig go because only Craig can make that weapon work. It’s such a small point, I hate to have anything to say about it (much less paragraph after paragraph), but from there spread all the cracks that plague the rest of the movie. It was such a shame, I thought.